Richard Flanagan interview: Winning the Booker was ‘a catastrophe of good fortune’

Ten years since he won the Booker, the author reflects on the responsibility he felt when writing The Narrow Road to the Deep North, growing up in a house with almost no books – and his love of translated fiction

Published August 7, 2024

Your novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the Booker Prize in 2014. How did it feel to win, and what impact did the win have on your career, both immediately and over the years that followed? How do you look back on the experience of winning a decade later?  

A catastrophe of good fortune.

Were there any memorable moments during the Booker Prize ceremony or in the run-up to it? How did you celebrate your win? How did you spend your prize money? 

In the run-up, my family grew concerned about our aged mother who had bet the entirety of her pension on me winning. My sisters spoke to her sternly. After I won she felt rather vindicated.

The prize money went on paying off the numerous debts I had accrued in the 12 years I had devoted to writing the book. The money was good, as the old saw goes, if only for financial reasons.

Your father’s time as a Japanese POW on the Burma Railway was one of the inspirations for the novel. What was the reaction to the book among your own family, and among other Burma Railway survivors and their families?

As a novelist I have always felt you must be free. You cannot be bound to, or concerned by what those close to you think, with their feelings or concerns, or it will cripple the necessary freedom you need to write something that is true. And yet, I must admit I felt a great responsibility to both those who died such terrible, wretched deaths on the Death Railway and those who survived; to not get it wrong as so many novels and films have got it wrong. It was clear to me that it was very easy to write a bad book on the subject and very hard to write a good book. As far as my family went, the struggle was to create a story that was not our father’s, and for that I needed a central character utterly unlike our father. Walking that line was why it took me 12 years to write and I did not know when done if I had succeeded or failed.

And so when the book was published and I started receiving the most beautiful letters from the survivors of that great crime and their families I was so greatly relieved. I had done my job. I think that would be the verdict too of my own family.

My grandparents were illiterate, my father revered the written word in consequence and saw its power as somehow magical

You have continued to explore the threads of your family history in your latest work, Question 7, which the Guardian  has called your finest work. What made you want to deviate from fiction this time around? Can the book be read and appreciated as a novel (the Guardian also called it an ‘unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir’)? 

Labels are for jam jars. I wrote Question 7 in the same spirit as I write my novels: asking questions to which I have no answers. So I don’t feel any deviation – rather liberation. I wanted to submit it for the Booker, but my publishers felt it would create too much confusion in the marketplace where it is branded as ‘non-fiction’. You could say it’s a category error, I suppose, but then perhaps in art the very idea of categories is an error. Luckily, I don’t think readers care. For them, there are just bad books and good books. If they see Question 7 as one of the latter, I am grateful.

Tell us about a book that made you want to become a writer. How did it inspire you to embark on your own creative journey, and how did it influence your writing style or aspirations as an author?  

Is it a creative journey? Or is it a foolish vanity that somehow worked out? Or is it some strange undertow of a tide in which I became entrapped and didn’t know how to escape? I have no idea. My grandparents were illiterate, my father revered the written word in consequence and saw its power as somehow magical. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps it was an Irish reverence for the word and its practitioners which was strong with my parents though we had next to no books. In the past, I used to make up authoritative answers to questions like this, answers that were really no more than audacious fictions and fresh self-inventions, but like so much else, I now must admit I know nothing.

Was there a book that defined your early or teenage years, or that made you fall in love with reading? In what ways did it shape you, or your worldview? 

Probably Camus’s The Outsider. I read comics and penny westerns up until I stumbled across Camus’s attractively slim volume at the age of 12 or 13. I was hungry for the adult world about which I knew and understood nothing. I read The Outsider with a strange mix of excitement and bewilderment. I understood none of it, of course. It’s also true that I thrilled to its essence: the way a book, like adult life, didn’t have to be knowable, reducible, simple and contained, to be gripping and mesmerising. I recognised this much in my ignorance: that there was something fundamentally true about the writing in a way that comics and science fiction I had read had not been true, but only entertainments and diversion. The Outsider pierced me and, in a sense, I am still writing out of that wound 50 years later.

Which book you are currently reading, and what made you pick it up? 

Marco Polo’s Travels. A marvel full of marvels. I am writing a children’s book with Yolngu kids in Arnhem land in far north Australia and have grown interested in the way that 400 years before Captain Cook discovered Australia, items from Australia were being traded to China, Egypt and Europe. It is entirely plausible that an Australian Aborigine may have followed these trading routes in a spirit of adventure or misadventure – or both – and discovered Europe centuries before Europeans discovered them. And of those medieval trading routes there is no finer chronicler than Marco Polo.

 What would you consider your all-time favourite book? How has it left a lasting impression on you?

Anna Karenina. Because like a magical object from a fairy tale it constantly changes shape and form each time you think you have grasped it. I reread it every decade or so and each time I find it is transformed and unrecognisable as the book I thought I knew from a decade before. Which reminds me that it must be about time to read Anna Karenina for the first time again. 

Lastly, is there a hidden gem from the Booker Library – an underappreciated title from among the 600+ books that have been nominated for the Booker and International Booker Prizes over the past half-century – that you would recommend to others, and if so, why? 

There are so many – but what I would recommend is not one book, but the International Booker Prize, which year after year introduces me to so many extraordinary writers that are new to me and whose marvellous books remind me that the measure of prizes is never the winners, but the doors it opens to us as readers.