richard flanagan the narrow road to the deep north

It was described by The Times Literary Supplement as 'one of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing'. ( November 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)įlanagan's first novel, Death of a River Guide (1994), is the tale of Aljaz Cosini, river guide, who lies drowning, reliving his life and the lives of his family and forebears.

Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. The neutrality of this article is disputed. Simon Caterson, writing in The Australian, described it as 'one of the least reliable but most fascinating memoirs in the annals of Australian publishing'. Friedrich killed himself in the middle of the book's writing and it was published posthumously. One of these was Codename Iago, an autobiography of Australian con man John Friedrich, which Flanagan ghostwrote in six weeks to make money to write his first novel. Early works įlanagan wrote four non-fiction works before moving to fiction, works that he called 'his apprenticeship'. The following year, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship at Worcester College, Oxford, where he was admitted to the degree of Master of Letters in History. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with First-Class Honours. įlanagan left school at the age of 16 but returned to study at the University of Tasmania, where he was president of the Tasmania University Union in 1983. He grew up in the remote mining town of Rosebery on Tasmania's western coast. Flanagan's father was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway and one of his three brothers is Australian rules football journalist Martin Flanagan.įlanagan was born with a severe hearing loss, which was corrected when he was six years old.

He is descended from Irish convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land during the Great Famine in Ireland. Early life and education įlanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961, the fifth of six children. 'onsidered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation', according to The Economist, the New York Review of Books described Flanagan as 'among the most versatile writers in the English language'. įlanagan was described by the Washington Post as 'one of our greatest living novelists'. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Richard Miller Flanagan (born 1961) is an Australian writer, who has also worked as a film director and screenwriter.

Richard flanagan the narrow road to the deep north