Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan is a novelist from Tasmania. "Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation," according to The Economist, each of his novels have attracted major praise and have received numerous awards and honors. He also has written and directed feature films. He was longlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize.

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 in the 1840s. His father is a survivor of the Burma Death Railway. One of his three brothers is Australian Rules football journalist Martin Flanagan. He grew up in the remote mining town of Rosebery on Tasmania's western coast.

Flanagan left school at the age of 16. He returned to study at the University of Tasmania, where he was president of the Tasmania University Union in 1983. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with first-class honors. The following year, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship at Worcester College, Oxford, where he was admitted to the degree of Master of Letters in History.

Flanagan wrote four non-fiction works before moving to fiction, works he has called "his apprenticeship." One of these was an autobiography of Australia's greatest con man, John Friedrich, which Flanagan ghost wrote 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."

His first novel, "Death of a River Guide," is the tale of Aljaz Cosini, 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." His next book, "The Sound of One Hand Clapping," which tells the story of Slovenian immigrants, was a major bestseller, selling more than 150,000 copies in Australia alone.

"Gould's Book of Fish," Flanagan’s third novel, 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 went on to win the 2002 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Flanagan has described these early novels as 'soul histories.' His fourth novel was "The Unknown Terrorist," which The New York Times called "stunning ... a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world." His fifth novel, "Wanting" 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.

His next novel is Booker Prize-nominated "The Narrow Road to the Deep North."

Richard Flanagan has written on literature, the environment, art and politics for the Australian and international press including Le Monde, The Daily Telegraph (London), Suddeutsche Zeitung, the New York Times and the New Yorker.

Flanagan is a council member of Voiceless, the animal protection institute.