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
looked
I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.
allowing almost brought love offers possible understanding war
If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.
greater larger
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.
contained form given horror life within
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.
tiny town
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
great greatly honoured prizes
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
accepted became doomed inferior theory
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
common courage writers
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
man
In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.
halt less named needs order people society spread turns
The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.
literary
I do not come out of a literary tradition.
contain life love
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
purpose horror imagine
The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand.
writing form force
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.