Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan
Richard Miller Flanaganis an Australian novelist from Tasmania. "Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist, each of his novels has attracted major praise and received numerous awards and honours. He also has written and directed feature films. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
CountryAustralia
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Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.
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There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.
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We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.
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When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.
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Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices.
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For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'
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God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
I get more optimistic as I get older.
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The only accusation of Gillian Triggs with the ring of truth is that she has lost the confidence of the government - but then, so too has Tony Abbott.
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We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
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The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.
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John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.
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History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.
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Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.