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Aussie Richard Flanagan wins Booker prize

Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan has become just the fourth Australian to win the prestigious Man Booker prize.

The 53-year-old received the award, worth STG50,000 ($A91,265) from the Duchess of Cornwall at a glitzy ceremony in London on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning AEDT).

Peter Carey slams Booker Prize for US authors

Flanagan’s winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is the story of Australian prisoners of war forced to work on the Burma Railway during WWII.

The novel was inspired by Flanagan’s late father, Archie Flanagan, who survived being a POW on the Thai-Burma railway, and died the day he finished the book.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North has already sold 60,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, and the win will ensure it stays on the best seller list for some time to come.

Richard-Flanagan-Narrow-RoadIt was one of six books short-listed for the international prize, which was opened up to include US authors for the first time this year.

Click the Advisor owl for the full shortlist.  

Booker ‘chook raffle’

“I’m astonished. You do not expect these strokes of good fortune to come your way, you’re just grateful to be back at the table the next day writing,” Flanagan said in a statement through his Australian publisher, Random House.

On accepting the award, he went into more detail.

“In Australia the Man Booker prize is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle,” Flanagan said at the Guildhall in central London.

“I just didn’t expect to end up the chicken.”

Flanagan told the audience he didn’t come from a literary tradition, but rather from a rainforest on an island at the end of the world.

“My grandparents were illiterate and I never expected to stand here before you in a grand hall in London as a writer being so honoured,” the Tasmanian said.

“Perhaps in consequence I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual traditions.”

Critical darling

Flanagan joins Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s Ark, 1982), Peter Carey (Oscar & Lucinda, 1988 and The True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001and South Australian-born DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, 2003) as the fourth Australian to be awarded the Booker – and the first Tasmanian.

His winning tome, his sixth book, has been universally praised by international media critics.

The Washington Post’s critic Ron Charles wrote in August, 2014: “Nothing since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has shaken me like this — all the more so because it’s based on recorded history, rather than apocalyptic speculation.”

While in the same month The New York Times’ Michael Gorra imparted: “I suspect that on rereading, this magnificent novel will seem even more intricate, more carefully and beautifully constructed.”

At the Booker ceremony, AC Grayling, chair of judges, said The Narrow Road to the Deep North was an essential piece of Flanagan’s destiny. 

“The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war. Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism,” Mr Grayling said.

“This is the book that Richard Flanagan was born to write.”

Readers to thank

Flanagan said last month he was astonished to be short listed.

“It’s a wonderful feeling, but it’s an overwhelming feeling too because to be a writer, you don’t expect those sort of things,” he said.

The book has struck a chord with readers in Australia, the UK and the US, and Flanagan said he regarded readers as the true test and the real judges.

“My greatest debt is to them. That’s why I write and that’s why I’ll continue to write,” he said.

“When I was first published there were no glowing reviews, there were no prizes.

“It was readers who found me and it was readers who kept buying my books and supporting me.

“It’s because of readers that I’m here now and I was able to write this book.”

—with AAP, ABC


A novel of the cruelty of war, tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love. Read Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Buy it here.

the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-northAugust, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. 
Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.  
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