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Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In 2024 won the Baillie Gifford Prize (for non-fiction) for his most recent book, Question 7. He is the first writer to win both prizes.

Randa Abdel-Fattah and Peter Singer at Adelaide Writers Week in 2023. This time, her invitation was withdrawn.

Politicians shouldn’t decide who appears at writers’ festivals. It’s a dangerous path

Australia’s best writers festival could collapse within days as international and local writers boycott it in protest at the removal of Randa Abdel-Fattah.

  • Richard Flanagan

Latest

The future of the Tasmania Devils hangs in the balance.

A footy club meant to unite Tasmanians is bitterly dividing them

The brutal irony is that the AFL’s demand for a near-bankrupt state to build a stadium to get a football team may lead to loathing and even failure in its home state.

  • Richard Flanagan

To defend our democracy, PM must disavow and abandon Segal report

Combating antisemitism is a noble mission, but Jillian Segal’s report risks stoking it.

  • Richard Flanagan
Anthony Albanese’s success over Peter Dutton and Adam Bandt has been well received by corporate Australia.

Labor now rules the centre right. The left is on the brink of irrelevance

Not being MAGA does not make Labor a party of progress. It has emerged as the new party of corporate Australia.

  • Richard Flanagan

Albanese’s inaction drives his own party towards extinction

Under Anthony Albanese, Labor gives the ever stronger impression that it has never seen a corporation that it won’t prostrate itself to.

  • Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan in the kitchen with his mother, Helen, in 2005. “Making bread was my mother’s way back to her past,” he says.

Author Richard Flanagan on his mum – and one ‘vast achievement’ he’d overlooked

Replaying richly coloured memories of his mother Helen leaves the Tasmanian Booker Prize-winner overcome by regret, grief and gratitude.

  • Richard Flanagan
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An artist’s impression of the new sporting stadium proposed in Hobart.

As Albanese backs an AFL stadium for Hobart, Tasmanians are living in tents

Tasmania’s new AFL stadium has become a symbol of government inaction on the poverty and homelessness that blight Australia’s smallest state

  • Richard Flanagan
The Crown of Queen Elizabeth

Perhaps, behind the crown lies nothing at all

We lie to ourselves when we indulge in a mass hysteria proclaiming that at the centre there is something greater than ourselves. But perhaps a mass hysteria is exactly what is needed to make us continue to believe that eternal lie.

  • Richard Flanagan
Scott Morrison enters the press conference on Wednesday.

Jabberwocky meets Captain Ahab as Morrison races down the rabbit hole

The nation is confronting a similar experience to Linda Blair in The Exorcist when her head does a 360-degree swivel exorcising the devil.

  • Richard Flanagan
Author Salman Rushdie.

Salman Rushdie, Charlie Hebdo, violence and cancel culture

The author’s life kept on intersecting with dramatic events that became so commonplace it is difficult to imagine how someone might stay sane and work, defining himself as a writer and not a victim.

  • Richard Flanagan