A short life of the author
Richard Flanagan (b. 1961) was born on 23 October 1961 in Longford, Tasmania, Australia. His father, Archie Flanagan, was a prisoner of war on the Burma Railway — the experience that became the central subject of his most important novel. He studied history at the University of Tasmania and was a Rhodes Scholar at Worcester College, Oxford.
Life and Career
Death of a River Guide (1994) — about a rafting guide drowning in the Franklin River, whose life and family history flash before him — was his debut. The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) — about a Slovenian immigrant family in Tasmania — was a bestseller in Australia.
Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) — about a convict painter in a Tasmanian penal colony — won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It is his most formally experimental novel, printed in different-coloured inks to reflect the fish paintings of the convict William Buelow Gould.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014) — about Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon on the Burma Railway in 1943, and the love affair that haunts his life — won the Booker Prize. The novel’s account of the railway — the starvation, the cholera, the beatings, the impossibility of maintaining dignity — is among the most harrowing war writing since the First World War poets. Its title comes from Bashō.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) — about an elderly Tasmanian woman’s death and her family’s response, set against the backdrop of bushfires — was his most environmentally urgent novel.
Major Works and Themes
Flanagan writes about Tasmania as a place of beauty and violence — colonial brutality, environmental destruction, and the persistence of love in the face of suffering.
Key Works
- Gould’s Book of Fish (2001)
- The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014)
- The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020)
Collecting Flanagan
Death of a River Guide (1994, McPhee Gribble, Australia) brings $50–$200.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014, Chatto & Windus UK) — the Booker winner — brings $30–$80.