Richard Flanagan

Richard Miller Flanagan (born 1961) is an Australian writer, who won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Question 7, making him the first writer in history to win both Britain's major fiction and non-fiction prizes. "Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation" according to The Economist, Flanagan has also worked as a film director and screenwriter.

Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961, the fifth of six children. He is descended from Irish convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land during the Great Famine in Ireland. Flanagan's father was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway and one of his three brothers is Australian rules football journalist Martin Flanagan.

Flanagan was born with severe hearing impairment, which was corrected when he was six years old. He grew up in the remote mining town of Rosebery on Tasmania's western coast.

Flanagan left school at the age of 16 but returned to study at the University of Tasmania, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with First-Class Honours. Flanagan was president of the Tasmania University Union in 1983. The following year, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Worcester College, Oxford, where he earned the degree of Master of Letters in History.

Flanagan wrote four non-fiction works before moving to fiction, works that he called "his apprenticeship". One of these was Codename Iago, an autobiography of Australian con man John Friedrich, which Flanagan ghostwrote in six weeks to make money to write his first novel. Friedrich killed himself in the middle of the book's writing and it was published posthumously. Simon Caterson, writing in The Australian, described it as "one of the least reliable but most fascinating memoirs in the annals of Australian publishing".

Flanagan's first novel, Death of a River Guide (1994), is the tale of Aljaz Cosini, a river guide, who lies drowning, reliving his life and the lives of his family and forebears. It was described by The Times Literary Supplement as "one of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing". The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), tells the story of Slovenian immigrants and was a major bestseller, selling more than 150,000 copies in Australia. Flanagan's first two novels, declared Kirkus Reviews, "rank with the finest fiction out of Australia since the heyday of Patrick White".

Gould's Book of Fish (2001) is based on the life of William Buelow Gould, a convict artist, and tells the tale of his love affair with a young black woman in 1828. It won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Flanagan described these early novels as 'soul histories'. The Unknown Terrorist (2006), was described by The New York Times as "stunning ... a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world". Wanting (2008) tells two parallel stories: about the novelist Charles Dickens in England, and Mathinna, an Aboriginal orphan adopted by Sir John Franklin, the colonial governor of Van Diemen's Land, and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin. As well as being a New Yorker Book of the Year and Observer Book of the Year, it won the Queensland Premier's Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Prize and the Tasmania Book Prize. The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), about a Tasmanian doctor who becomes a Japanese prisoner of war, won the 2014 Man Booker Prize. The Washington Post wrote that "If you read “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” you’ll understand that Flanagan is one of our greatest living novelists".

First Person (2017), based loosely on his experience early in his writing career ghost-writing the autobiography of John Friedrich. The New Yorker noted "the novel, with its switchbacking recollections and cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, eventually, death, is enigmatic and mesmerizing" while the New York Review of Books called it a "tour-de-force".