Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan (2013)

Richard Miller Flanagan (* 1961 in Longford , Tasmania ) is an Australian writer .

Life

Richard Flanagan is the fifth of six children of an Irish Catholic family who settled in Tasmania in 1849. His father was a teacher and was used during the Second World War in Japanese captivity in the construction of the Thai-Burma death railway . Flanagan grew up in the village of Rosebery . He was educated in state schools until he left school at 16 and worked in the Australian bush. However, Flanagan took up his education again, went on a Rhodes Scholarship to Worcester College at the University of Oxford and completed his history here in 1991.

Flanagan is married with three children and currently resides in Hobart , Tasmania.

He has published six novels so far. The book Gould's Book of Fish won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers' Prize . In 2014 he received the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North , on which he had worked for twelve years .

Works

Novels

• Death of a River Guide , 1994
  • Death on the River , Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-8270-0478-0
• The Sound of One Hand Clapping , 1997
  • At the beginning of memory , 1998
• Gould's Book of Fish , 2001
  • Gould's Book of Fish , Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-8270-0477-2
• The Unknown Terrorist , 2006
• Wanting , 2008
  • Mathinna , Atrium Verlag, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-85535-135-0
• The Narrow Road to the Deep North , 2013
  • The narrow path through the hinterland , Piper Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-492-05708-0 (translated by Eva Bonné )
• First person . Chatto & Windus, 2017

Non-fiction

• A Terrible Beauty: History of the Gordon River Country (1985)
• The Rest of the World is Watching (1990), as co-editor

Movies

Flanagan wrote the script and directed The Sound of one Hand Clapping , based on his novel of the same name. The film premiered at the 1998 Berlinale and was nominated for the Golden Bear for Best Film.

Honourings and prices

• First Fiction Award : Death of a River Guide
• Australian Booksellers Book of the Year Award : The Sound of One Hand Clapping
• Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction : The Sound of One Hand Clapping
• 1996 National Fiction Award : Death of a River Guide
• 2002 Commonwealth Writers' Prize : Gould's Book of Fish
• 2014 Man Booker Prize

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard Flanagan in the catalog of the German National Library
• Richard Flanagan in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• "Richard Flanagan: The Making of a Tasmanian Best-Seller" (Interview by Giles Hugo)
• Max Cullen: "A Question of Genius" ( Memento from September 4, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) In: ninemsn from March 9, 2003
• “Many hands clapping. An interview with Richard Flanagan "
• In conversation with Vladimir Balzer: Australian writer on bush fires: "The government is committing a historical crime" , deutschlandfunkkultur.de (January 2020)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Wieland Freund : One life is not enough for that . Interview, in: The Literary World , January 9, 2016, p. 4
2. ↑ Slap me in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on January 10, 2016, page 44