In his Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan found the humane in the face of a great crime. The 2014 book, about the World War II Prisoners of War who built the Thai-Burma railway, earned Flanagan parallels with Cormac McCarthy and a vocal fan in former US President Barack Obama.
Like his celebrated creation, the painter William Buelow Gould, who escapes tyranny by becoming a sea horse, Flanagan is a writer who constantly reinvents himself. Each novel finds a new style and a new subject, from eco-tragedy to contemporary drama, zeitgeist thriller, meditation on desire, or tales of tyrants and artists. With First Person, Flanagan uses aspects of his own autobiography to mock memoir – and to ask, in our age of 'fake news', what is truth and where is freedom.
At the Athenaeum Theatre, join one of Australia’s leading literary talents on his exploration into the meaning, and the problem, of truth.
This event will be Auslan interpreted.
Presented in partnership with Readings.
Featuring
Richard Flanagan
Michael Williams
Michael Williams is the editor of The Monthly. He was previously the Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne as its ...