A love story unfolds over half a century, as Richard Flanagan’s epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man’s reckoning with the truth.
The Man Booker Prize 2014
The year the prize was opened up to every nationality. Fears that Americans would now dominate were allayed with a second Antipodean winner in a row, with another historical novel.
The pre-prize chatter, some of it very heated, was about the wisdom or otherwise of allowing any novel written in English and published in the UK to compete – in other words, Americans. Critics feared a transatlantic invasion, although in the event only two US writers, Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler, made the shortlist.
It was Richard Flanagan, with a novel about illicit love and the brutal treatment of prisoners forced to build the Burma railway, who triumphed – the third Australian to win the prize.
Winner The Booker Prize 2014
- By
- Richard Flanagan
- Published by
- Chatto & Windus
A love story unfolds over half a century, as Richard Flanagan’s epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man’s reckoning with the truth.
The shortlist
Joshua Ferris's dazzling comic novel. How would you feel if the person impersonating you online was having a much better life than you were?
Rosemary doesn't talk much, and about certain things she's silent.
In his dystopian drama, Howard Jacobson has created a thought-provoking love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying.
A son’s idealistic ambition to change the world has devastating consequences for his family and beyond, in Neel Mukherjee’s vividly powerful novel.
Ali Smith’s highly original literary double-take is a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions.
By Ali Smith
