2024-12-01
37 分钟After winning the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, Richard Flanagan joins Georgina Godwin to discuss ‘Question 7’, his life and career, and his plans after winning the prize. Described by Peter Carey as maybe just being “the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years”, ‘Question 7’ is a love letter to his island home, his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello, this is Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today is the winner of the 2024 Bailie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, and he becomes the first author to win the double both this award and the Booker Prize for the novel the Narrow Road to the Deep North.
He's also an ambassador for the Indigenous Literary foundation, an Australian not for profit that works to address the educational disadvantages faced by Indigenous Australian children and young by providing access to books and literacy programs.
He worked with Baz Luhrmann as a writer on the 2008 film Australia and the Narrow Road to the Deep north is being adapted for television and is currently in production.
Describing his winning book, Question 7.
Isabel Hilton, who was chair of the judges at this year's Bailie Gifford Prize, said that it spoke to the judges for its outstanding literary qualities and its profound humanity.
The writer Peter Carey says it may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years.
Richard Flanagan, welcome to Meet the Writers.
This book you put at one point is a love letter to your parents.
And I really wanted to go back into your history, into your family history, because it's deep and complicated and really influences everything that you do.
In this beautiful hybrid memoir.
I wanted to start with your great great grandparents, the Flanagan that you describe who was transported to Tasmania.
Tell us about what you know about him.
Virtually all my ancestors, as much as we know, were convicts transported to Tasmania, mostly in the 1840s, mostly from Ireland during the famine.
On my father's side, it was Thomas Flanagan, who's my great great grandfather.
He was transported for the crime of stealing seven pounds of cornmeal at the height of the famine to feed his family.
On my mother's side, it was my great great grandfather who my grandmother remembered vividly was Edward Mad Ned Green.
And he'd actually been a white boy.
They were a sort of physical force revolutionaries on the west coast of Ireland, Gaelic speaking.