The novelist Richard Miller Flanagan is widely regarded as one of contemporary Australia’s finest writers. Born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961, he was brought up in the small mining town of Rosebery in the west of the island. Flangan is the fifth of six children in a family descended from Irish convicts transported in the 1840s to what was then known as Van Diemen’s Land. Flanagan left school at sixteen to work as a bush labourer, before attending the University of Tasmania where he graduated with first class honours in 1983. He was then awarded a Rhodes scholarship to attend Oxford University, where he took a Master of Letters degree in History. Returning to Tasmania, Flanagan worked as a labourer and a river guide and produced four non-fiction works before publishing his first novel.
Death of a River Guide (1994) is the first of three fictions in which Flanagan explored aspects of Tasmania’s past and issues of identity and belonging. River guide Aljaz Cosini is trapped under rocks in the Franklin River while guiding a tour party and, as he drowns, he has a series of visions that reveal his family’s history, including his convict grandfather and his Indigenous Australian heritage. At the same time, Aljaz’s visions show him how white settlement has destroyed the Indigenous population and damaged the island’s environment. The novel ends at the moment of Aljaz’s death with a final vision of generations of his family, both Indigenous and settler, feasting together in an act of love, reconciliation and shared belonging.
Death of a River Guide was seen as “one of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing” (Smith, 1997, 21) and it won the Victorian Premier’s Prize Scheaffer Pen Prize for Best First Fiction in 1995. However, like the work of contemporaries, including David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993), it was also criticised for its appropriation of aspects of Indigenous culture (spirituality, heightened awareness of the natural world) by Aljaz as a way of legitimising his settler identity and his right to belong in the land.
Flanagan’s next novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), focuses on the post-war migration of workers from Eastern Europe to Australia. Bojan and Maria Buloh flee Yugoslavia and arrive in Tasmania with their daughter, Sonja. There Bojan, like other migrants, works on building dams for hydro-electric power. However, the combination of their inability to forget their past, the hostility of settler Australians who regard them as “wogs” and “reffos” [refugees], and the poor conditions in which they live, cause the family to disintegrate: Maria commits suicide, Bojan turns to drink, and Sonja leaves Tasmania for Sydney. When she returns some twenty years later “penniless, partnerless and pregnant” (Wimmer, 2003, 130) she is looked after in the migrant community of Hobart before being reconciled with her father, who decorates her rented house to turn it into a replica of a Slovenian home. This heavily sentimental ending, with its emphasis on the redemptive power of love, cannot, however, take away from the bitterness that runs through a novel that exposes the myths of Australian claims to welcome migrants and to celebrate their success.
While the book was a commercial success, selling over 150,000 copies in Australia and winning the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Best Novel in 1998, it received a mixed reception from critics. While some welcomed Flanagan’s focus on post-war migration as a major contribution to debates over Australian identity, others were less convinced. For example, Stephen Henighan argued that Flanagan “denies his immigrant characters their hybrid experience” (1998, 22) and shuts them out of Tasmanian and Australian society.
The third of Flanagan’s Tasmanian novels is Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) which purports to be the prison journal of William Buelow Gould, painter, forger and convict. It examines the impact of British colonialism on early nineteenth-century Tasmania when the island was both the “dumping ground for convicted criminals from the largest empire the world has seen” (Boyce, 2008, 1) and a place of harsh imprisonment for recidivist offenders, as portrayed in Marcus Clarke’s classic novel For the Term of His Natural Life (1872). Colonisation of the island also led to the near extinction of the Indigenous Tasmanian population through a combination of killing and expulsion which has been likened to ethnic cleansing (Boyce, 296). Finally, Tasmania’s early colonists began an ongoing process of environmental damage and degradation for commercial gain, an issue of major concern for Flanagan.
The novel centres on Gould’s imprisonment under the regime of the megalomaniac Commandant, who devises ever more refined tortures for the prisoners and whose manic capitalist entrepreneurialism destroys the island’s environment before collapsing into failure. His colleague, the surgeon Lempriere, regards the island’s people and its environment as raw material for his research, sending the severed heads of Indigenous Australians to England for analysis. Flanagan here presents a savage picture of the devastating impact of colonialism, capitalism and Enlightenment science on Indigenous Australians and on the natural world. At the same time he castigates settler Australians’ willed amnesia about, and reinvention of, their history in ways which echo Death of a River Guide. When Gould escapes from his cell he finds the island’s registry and discovers that its records are forgeries and inventions, that:
They’ve all been making the place up, ... as the island of forgetting, because anything is easier than remembering. They’ll forget what happened here for a hundred years or more, then they’ll reimagine it ... because any story will be better than the sorry truth. (Flanagan, 2003, 401)
The novel presents a bleak, dark and disturbing picture of Australia’s past and present, but, like Flanagan’s earlier novels, it also presents love as a possible source of redemption and reconciliation.
Gould’s Book of Fish was a critical and commercial success, winning both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Australian Literary Society’s Gold Medal in 2002. In particular the novel was admired for its formal inventiveness, mixing as it does elements of magical realism, post-modernity and post-colonialism; its writerly qualities; its convincing voice; and, above all, its sheer ambition.
For his next novel, The Unknown Terrorist (2006), Flanagan moved away from the past to address how the ‘war on terror’ affects human lives. The book, one of several Australian novels of the period to address the response to terrorism following the events of 9/11, consciously reworks Heinrich Böll’s 1974 novella, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, set at the time of German panic at the actions of the Red Army Faction. In Böll’s work, an innocent young woman working as a housekeeper is hounded by a tabloid reporter after she has encountered a man wanted by the police, and she eventually shoots the reporter in a bar. In Flanagan’s novel, the housekeeper is replaced by a pole dancer, Gina Davies, known as the Doll, and the setting is changed to Sydney, but the broad outlines of the plot remain the same. Where Flanagan’s earlier novels had punctured the often idealized visions of Australia’s past, The Unknown Terrorist presents a dystopian Australian present in which politicians, police and journalists work to produce a fear of terrorism intended to control public views and attitudes. It also presents Sydney as a city whose residents display the least attractive aspects of contemporary Australia, with their casual racism, knee-jerk misogyny, ingrained xenophobia, and anti-Islamism (attitudes the Doll shares until she becomes their victim).
While Böll’s work is written in the cool style of the report of an investigation, Flanagan adopts the popular genre of the fast-paced thriller to tell his story. Although this approach has a certain logic to it, it does not wholly work, and the novel was poorly received. It was criticised both for the one-dimensional presentation of the characters and the cartoon-strip way in which the story is told. This unfavourable response undercut both Flanagan’s polemical attack on the politics and presentation of terror, and his habitual invocation of the power of love in the novel’s closing pages.
Flanagan’s fifth novel, Wanting (2008), marked a partial return to Tasmania, intertwining episodes from the lives of Tasmanian governor and polar explorer, Sir John Franklin, and his wife Lady Jane; an orphaned Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, adopted by the Franklins; and Charles Dickens, to whom Jane Franklin turns for help when Sir John and his crew die and are accused of cannibalism on a failed arctic expedition. However, Flanagan here is concerned less with critiquing the past than with examining the issues of desire, passion and want that run through the novel.
Lady Jane Franklin wants but cannot have a child and adopts Mathinna as a substitute, trying to turn the girl into her idea of a properly behaved white child, an act that foreshadows the removal of the stolen generations of Indigenous Australian children to white institutions and families, with the aim of assimilating them into white society. Sir John, a man wanting in energy and enthusiasm, dislikes the role of colonial governor and longs to return to his only passion, polar exploration. He neglects his official duties for the company of Mathinna whom he increasingly desires sexually and eventually rapes. Mathinna, left behind when the Franklins return to London, wants love and affection but, estranged from both white and Indigenous Australian society, she falls into a life of drunkenness and prostitution before she is murdered. Finally, Dickens wants a cure for his restlessness and his unhappiness in his marriage. He finds an antidote in his increasing desire for Ellen Ternan, with whom he acts in a play loosely based on the Franklin expedition, The Frozen Deep. Underpinning this rich mix of wants and desires, fact and fiction, are two of Flanagan’s repeated themes, the wrongs of colonialism, with its desire to possess and control other peoples, and the power of love “in all its pain and infinite heartbreak” (Flanagan, 2009, 239).
The novel, which won the Western Australian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2008 and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2009, was well received by critics, both for the quality of its writing and for its narrative control of the complex storylines. Furthermore, Flanagan’s return to the Tasmanian past seemed to mark a return to the writerly skills for which he had been lauded earlier in his career.
As well as writing novels, Flanagan has also been a prolific journalist and essayist and a collection of his non-fiction writing was published in 2011 under the title And What Do You Do, Mr Gable?. Much of his most powerful non-fiction writing has reflected his concern with environmental issues affecting his native island, particularly the damming of rivers and the felling of native forests, and his polemical approach has made him unpopular with Tasmanian governments and industrialists. He has also worked on screenplays, both for his own 1998 adaptation of The Sound of One Hand Clapping, and for Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 film Australia.
Five years after Wanting, Flanagan published the book for which he is best-known internationally, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013). The book again examines Australian history, this time the appalling experiences of Australian prisoners of war building the so-called death railway from Burma to Thailand for the Japanese during the Second World War. In writing the novel, Flanagan sought to memorialise the experiences of his father, a survivor of the death railway who, the reader learns, died on the day the novel was completed.
The work tells the story of the war hero Dorrigo Evans and is fashioned as a triptych. The first part recounts Evans’s early years from his birth in Tasmania to his leaving for the war, the central section focuses on the war and particularly the horror of life in a prison camp where Evans is the senior Australian officer, and the final section tells of Evans’s post-war life and the difficulty he and his colleagues encounter in adjusting to peace-time Australia and making sense of their war-time experiences.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North continues Flanagan’s critique of the evils of colonialism and imperialism, here directed at the Japanese rather than the British. The novel also continues Flanagan’s exploration of the theme of the power of love, with its lyrical account of Evans’s pre-war love affair with his uncle’s wife, Amy, the memory of which dominates the rest of his life and sours his relationship with his wife, Ella. However, the work signals a shift in Flanagan’s writing about Australia. In what is his most nationalistic novel he celebrates Australian values and attitudes in a way that is far removed from his earlier fictions, with their dismantling of Australian self-perceptions.
The book was widely acclaimed and, among other awards, it won both the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize in 2014. However, the work was not universally applauded. For example, Michael Hofmann criticised the novel’s structure, the quality of the prose, and the plausibility of the central character in what he saw as an example of “the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution” (Hofmann, 2014, 17). Moreover, the intervention of the conservative Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott to make the novel a joint winner of the Literary Prize was controversial.
Following Flanagan’s decision to donate his prize money for winning the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Prize to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation he became an Ambassador for the Foundation in 2015, the same year that he published his non-fiction book on Syrian refugees, Notes on an Exodus.
Flanagan’s seventh novel, First Person (2017), tells the story of a young Tasmanian writer, Kif Kehlmann, who is commissioned to ghostwrite the story of Siegfried Heidl, former Chief Executive of the Australian Safety Organisation, who has been arrested for embezzlement and commits suicide shortly before his trial, leaving Kehlmann to complete the memoir himself. The novel draws on Flanagan’s own commission to help write a similar autobiography, that of John Friedrich, the Director of the National Safety Council of Australia, a job which, like that of the fictional Kehlmann, Flanagan took on primarily to earn money to support himself and his family while writing his first novel.
Set in the claustrophobic offices of the book’s publisher in Melbourne, the first section of the novel tells the story of the relationship between Kehlmann and Heidl, highlighting Kehlmann’s difficulty in working with a man who is a consummate liar and fantasist, who provides no reliable information about his past, and who gives his ghostwriter no help. Kehlmann becomes increasingly obsessed by Heidl who, he fears, is taking over his life. Following Heidl’s death, and the publication of Kehlmann’s largely invented memoir, there is an extended coda which tells the story of Kehlmann’s increasing fame in the media world, and the personal cost of his success, while exposing the values and standards of that world.
First Person again represents a shift in focus for Flanagan, away from Australia’s past and towards a concern with the relationship between life and fiction. In telling the story of the encounter between Kehlmann and Heidl, Flanagan writes about the act of writing fiction, of inventing character and creating stories, and also about how we crave narratives to make sense of and order the world. In the novel’s coda he shows how the lies and evasions which marked Heidl’s life have now become the touchstone of success in a media increasingly obsessed with reality shows and fake news.
The novel itself, part-fiction, part-memoir, performs the difficulty of separating truth and fiction in a way that is worthy of Heidl himself. However, the book’s form also makes it somewhat repetitive and this, together with an uncertainty of tone that stems in part from Flanagan’s use of first-person narrative, has contributed to its lukewarm reception.
Flanagan’s most recent novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020), is again set primarily in Tasmania, but very much in the present day. He depicts Australia’s island state suffering an ecological crisis as wildfires burn out of control and species are continually extinguished: “The ladybirds gone soldier beetles bluebottles gone ... the quolls potoroos pardalotes swift parrots going going going” (Flanagan, 2021, 6-7). Against this backdrop Flanagan tells the story of the slow death of Francie Foley whose ebbing life is prolonged by the demands of her two most successful and driven children, Anna and Terzo, that everything be done, regardless of financial and human cost, to keep her alive, despite her wishes. The third surviving child, Tommy, a stammerer who earns a living as a labourer, would be happy to respect his mother’s wish to be allowed to die, but is constantly overruled by his siblings. Only after their sudden deaths is Francie’s life brought to an end. Running alongside this story is an epidemic of vanishing body parts, starting with Anna’s loss of a finger and continuing to the almost complete disappearance of her son, Gus, reduced to three fingers and a thumb wrapped round a gaming console.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is, then, a novel of extinction, erasure and disintegration at both the individual and societal level. A world that had seemed immense and abundant is being wantonly destroyed. Against this picture of devastation, Flanagan offers, again, the redemptive power of love and kindness together with the fragile hope that wonder at the natural world might overcome the destructive power unleashed by humanity -- a power that is symbolised by the return of the orange-bellied parrot to its nesting site at the book’s end.
The novel received a mixed response, from praise for Flanagan’s prose style to unease about its hybrid form in which “the private and public themes [are] crudely yoked together” (Massie, 2021). In particular, the intensely human story of Francie’s dying, set against the death of the natural world, is undermined by the magical realist loss of body parts which is poorly integrated into the novel while important issues, such as the role of paedophile priests in the death of Francie’s son Ronnie, or the whiff of corruption that hangs around Terzo, are barely explored. In many ways the book performs the lack of attentiveness that it critiques as its characters retreat from harsh reality into the trivia of social media.
More recently Flanagan has moved away from fiction. In 2021 he published Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry, an impassioned denunciation of the creation of an industry based on the mass production of a fish that cannot naturally live in Tasmanian waters, and the ecological damage that ensues. This book reflects Flanagan’s passionate commitment to the natural environment and his excoriation of the corporate greed that he sees as responsible for its destruction.
Toxic was followed in 2023 by the widely-acclaimed Question 7 which won the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction in 2024, making Flanagan the first writer to win the UK’s premier awards for fiction and non-fiction. Described by the Australian novelist Peter Carey as “a profoundly moving love song for the writer’s parents, a forensic excavation, a lament, a confession, a jig-saw puzzle in which Hiroshima connects to HG Wells, and the Martians colonise Tasmania” (Carey, 2023), this is a more complex and meditative work than Toxic. However Flanagan’s environmental concern again runs through the book, and he chose not to accept the £50,000 cash prize that went with the Baillie Gifford award until the firm set out a clear plan to reduce its investment in the fossil fuel industry.
Question 7, which takes its title from a Chekhov short story, weaves together a range of stories in a more controlled, coherent and integrated way than in Flanagan’s previous novel. The book opens with Flanagan’s 2012 visit to the site of the coal mine in Japan where his father had been a slave labourer and his meeting with a former prison guard. From here it widens out to tell of the imaginative conception of the atomic bomb by H. G. Wells, its development as told through the life of Leo Szilard, an atomic scientist who came to oppose the bomb’s use, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which indirectly saved Flanagan’s father’s life. Alongside these stories runs the story of Flanagan’s own life and that of his parents in a poor, rural part of Tasmania, an island shadowed by convictism, colonialism and the nineteenth-century genocide waged against its Indigenous peoples. The book ends with an account of Flanagan’s near-death when trapped in a kayak in the Franklin River, the basis of his first novel, Death of a River Guide.
Underneath these stories Flanagan seeks to address the bigger issues of history and memory; of guilt and responsibility; of how we measure evils in a world where there is no “moral calculus to death. … no equation of horror” (Flanagan, 2024, 202); and of the role of fiction in revealing the real world below the surface of the world we seem to inhabit. They are, he suggests, questions to which there are no answers, only more questions. Against these questions, he erects again the power of love, which throughout his writing career he has valorised as a source of redemption. Despite its weaknesses and flaws, such as the occasional strained writing and the tic of ending sections with the phrase “‘That’s life”, reminiscent of, but less justified than, Kurt Vonnegut’s recurrent “So it goes” in Slaughterhouse 5, Question 7 is Flanagan’s most impressive work since Wanting.
In his Man Booker Prize acceptance speech, Flanagan declared that “I do not come out of a literary tradition. I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate” (Flanagan, 2014). However his literary career belies its beginnings, ranging from the dissection of the Australian past and present to meditating on the nature of fiction and demonstrating a striking ability to work in a range of forms. He has recently hinted that Question 7 may be his last book, that the urgency to write has left him. If so, he leaves a distinguished, if perhaps inevitably uneven, legacy.
Works cited
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Fish. London: Atlantic Books. 2003.
───. Wanting. Sydney: Vintage. 2009.
───. Man Booker Prize Acceptance Speech, 14 October
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───. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. London:
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───. Question 7. London: Chatto & Windus.
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Books, 18 December 2014, pp. 17-18.
Massie, Allan. “Book review: The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by
Richard Flanagan.” The Scotsman, 7 January 2021. Online at
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Citation: Staniforth, Martin. "Richard Flanagan". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 February 2018; last revised 17 March 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12730, accessed 02 April 2025.]
