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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War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.
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My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
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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.
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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.
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Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.
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I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
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What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
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Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change.
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Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.
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After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.
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'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.
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The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.