Richard Flanagan was the fifth of six children. He was educated at state schools, leaving school at the age of sixteen to work as a labourer in the bush. He later returned to further his education at the University of Tasmania and went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship.
In addition to his novels, which have won both national and international acclaim, Flanagan has also published a history of the Tasmanian Green Movement , The Rest of the World Is Watching (1990), with Cassandra Pybus, A Terrible Beauty: History of the Gordon River Country (1985) and On the Mountain (1996), a pictorial and natural history of Mount Wellington, with Jamie Kirkpatrick and photographs by Peter Dombrovskis.
Flanagan's 2014 novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, won the Man Booker Prize. It was also awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for fiction in 2014 alongside Steven Carroll's A World of Other People. He donated the $40,000 to the Indigenous Literacy Fund, saying 'If just one of those children in turn becomes a writer, if just one brings to Australia and to the world an idea of the universe that arises out of that glorious lineage of 60,000 years of Australian civilisation, then I will think this prize has rewarded not just me, but us all.'
In 2017, Flanagan withdrew his novels from consideration for the 2018 Miles Franklin Award and any future Miles Franklin Awards.