person or book cover
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Richard Flanagan Richard Flanagan i(A10641 works by)
Born: Established: 1961 Longford, Northern Midlands, Midlands, Tasmania, ;
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

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.

Exhibitions

17022329
18387981

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • In 2016 Flanagan was appointed as the Boisbouvier Founding Chair in Australian Literature at The University of Melbourne.

  • Voted number 28 in the Booktopia Top 50 Favourite Australian Authors for 2018

  • Other works not individually indexed include:

    Seize the Fire : Three Speeches (Penguin Random House Australia, 2018)

    Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry (2021)

Personal Awards

2022 longlisted Tasmania Book Prizes Tasmanian Literary Awards Premier's Prize for Non-fiction for 'Toxic: the rotting underbelly of the Tasmanian salmon industry'.
2022 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year for 'Toxic'.
2021 shortlisted Walkley Award Best Non-Fiction Book for 'Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry'

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Question 7 Sydney : Knopf Australia , 2023 25958821 2023 single work prose

'Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows.

'By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.

'At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.' (Publication summary)

2024 shortlisted Baillie Gifford Prize
2024 shortlisted Booksellers Choice Award BookPeople Book of the Year Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year
2024 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year
2024 longlisted APA Book Design Awards Best Designed Non Fiction Book designed by Adam Laszczuk.
y separately published work icon The Living Sea of Waking Dreams Melbourne : Penguin , 2020 19615971 2020 single work novel

'In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight.

'When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.

'An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving—and astonishing—best.' (Publication summary)

2021 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize for Fiction
2021 shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award Book of the Year
2021 longlisted APA Book Design Awards Best Designed Literary Fiction / Poetry Cover designed by Adam Laszczuk
2021 shortlisted Indie Awards Fiction
y separately published work icon First Person Melbourne : Penguin Random House Australia , 2017 10929917 2017 single work novel

'First Person, Flanagan’s first novel since winning the Man Booker Prize in 2014, is inspired by Flanagan’s real-life experience ghost-writing the memoir of Australian conman Johann Friedrich Hohenberger.

'The novel is written in the first person by reality TV producer Kif Kehlman and details how Kif, as a younger, penniless writer unable to finish his first novel, agrees to ghost write the memoir of a notorious con man, Ziggy Heidl, who has defrauded the banks of $700 million.

'As work gets underway, Kif begins to fear that he is being corrupted by the con man and grows ever more uncertain as to whether he is ghost writing a memoir, or if Ziggy Heidl is rewriting him.

'At the novel’s heart is a question: what is the truth?' (Publication summary)

2019 longlisted Tasmania Book Prizes Tasmanian Literary Awards Margaret Scott Prize
2019 longlisted International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
2018 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Fiction
2018 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year
2018 longlisted Indie Awards Fiction
Last amended 29 Nov 2021 10:09:59
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