Twitter
Advertisement

The life and times of Man Booker 2014 winner Richard Flanagan

Latest News
article-main
FacebookTwitterWhatsappLinkedin

Australian author Richard Flanagan won the £50,000 Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night for his wartime novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is dedicated to 'prisoner san byaku san ju go' - his father's prison number, 335. The title comes from a Japanese book by the haiku poet Basho. 

The book draws on two real-life stories. One belongs to his father, Archie Flanagan, and his experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war (POW) and one of 'Dunlop's Thousand' - the men commanded by Sir Ernest Edward Dunlop, an Australian surgeon and war hero. The other is a love story he once heard from his parents, about a WWII soldier. 

It took Flanagan 12 years to get his novel right. He wrote five different versions of this book before getting to the final one - a story composed of linked haiku, in the form of a haibun, as a vast family epic spanning a century and in the first person plural as an Australian odyssey.

In an interview with the Australian political magazine The Monthly, Flanagan spoke about going to Japan and meeting some of the guards who had been at his father's camp. On his return he told his father about meeting them, and how he felt they all had some regret and shame about what happened. Later that day, his father lost all memory of the POW camps. In their last conversation, his father asked about the book, and Richard told him it was finished. His father died later that day. 

Flanagan is a descendant from Irish convicts during the Great Famine of 1845-1852. He was born in 1961, the fifth of six children, and spent his childhood in the mining town of Rosebery, Tasmania. His grandparents were illiterate, but his family placed high value on reading and writing. He inherited a passion for words from his father. 

Flanagan left school at 16 to work as a bush labourer; he actually wanted to be a carpenter. He attended the University of Tasmania, graduating with first class honours in 1982 and the following year, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University.

Flanagan started out writing history books. He has written about the history of unemployment in Britain, a critique of the Tasmanian Greens, a history of the Gordon River Country and ghostwritten John Friederich's (the former head of the National Safety Council) autobiography. 

Flanagan's first fiction novel was in 1994. Death of a River Guide is the story of a guide on the Franklin River who starts digging into nostalgia while drowning. The Sound of One Hand Clapping tells the story of Slovenian immigrants. Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish is based on the life of Billy Gould, a convict artist who has a love affair with a young black woman. His fourth novel was The Unknown Terrorist. Wanting, his fifth book, 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 (as Tasmania was called during early colonial times), and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin. 

Flanagan has also directed a film based on The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which premiered at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival. It was nominated for the Golden Bear for best film. He has worked with Baz Luhrmann as a writer on the film Australia. 

Flanagan loves canoeing and has canoed the Franklin River in Tasmania 13 times. He was also a member of the first expedition to canoe Tasmania's Jane River and Gordon Gorge.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is published by Random House. 

Find your daily dose of news & explainers in your WhatsApp. Stay updated, Stay informed-  Follow DNA on WhatsApp.
Advertisement

Live tv

Advertisement
Advertisement