Author
Richard Flanagan
Associated Country
Australia
Richard Flanagan is an Australian novelist, essayist, and filmmaker known for his richly detailed historical fiction and powerful storytelling. He was born in Tasmania, where much of his work is set, and studied at the University of Tasmania and Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
Flanagan is best known for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), which won the Booker Prize. The novel draws on the experiences of Australian prisoners of war during World War II and explores themes of love, suffering, and memory. He is also the author of several other acclaimed works, including Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) and Death of a River Guide (1994).
His writing is celebrated for its lyrical prose, emotional depth, and historical insight. Flanagan is widely regarded as one of Australia’s leading literary voices, known for bringing the country’s landscapes and histories vividly to life.
Flanagan is best known for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), which won the Booker Prize. The novel draws on the experiences of Australian prisoners of war during World War II and explores themes of love, suffering, and memory. He is also the author of several other acclaimed works, including Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) and Death of a River Guide (1994).
His writing is celebrated for its lyrical prose, emotional depth, and historical insight. Flanagan is widely regarded as one of Australia’s leading literary voices, known for bringing the country’s landscapes and histories vividly to life.
Books
Question 7 2025
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events...
Anna's aged mother is dying. Condemned by her children's pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she...
Toxic 2021
In a triumph of marketing, the Tasmanian salmon industry has for decades succeeded in presenting itself as world’s best practice and its product as healthy and clean, grown in environmentally pristine...
First Person 2019
Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal....
Wanting 2016
In 1841, Sir John Franklin and his wife, Lady Jane, move to the remote penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. There Lady Jane falls in love with a lively aboriginal girl, Mathinna, whom she...
August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, is a...
What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in the country? Gina Davies is about to find out when, after a night spent with an attractive stranger, she...
Gould's Book of Fish 2002
Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life...
Beneath a waterfall on a remote Tasmanian river, Aljaz Cosini is drowning. Beset by visions, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. He sees his father, Harry, burying...
In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her migrant Slovenian father was drunk, her mother...