Interview | Richard Flanagan: The writer’s only job is to be not boring

In an interview, Richard Flanagan discusses his writing journey, embracing life’s questions, and the essence of literature.

Before Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan sat down to write his 2023 book Question 7, he was on a clock.

He had been handed down a diagnosis of early onset dementia and was given 12 months to settle his affairs before things got worse. The shocking news made him want to write a book about “what it is to live and what it is to love”.

The book, part memoir, part history, part travelogue, won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. Soon after he finished writing it, his doctor clarified that there was no onset of dementia — in fact, it had been a radiologist’s mistaken reading of an MRI.

But he used the 11 months prior to the clarification “to write about kindness, gratitude and other values of humanity,” through the life stories of his father, mother and himself. He looked into periods of light and darkness (his father’s internment at a Japanese camp; how he himself wished to be a writer, “absurdly”, when he was four, his mother’s extraordinary courage, and he recalls an instance when he nearly drowned). The book is dedicated to the person who saved his life.

In 2014, Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize for his novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, where the protagonist is a Japanese prisoner of war at a camp on the Burma Death Railway. Last year, the book was adapted into a web series starring Jacob Elordi, Odessa Young and Ciarán Hinds.

On the sidelines of the recent Jaipur Literature Festival, Flanagan said that he was moved when a reader walked up to him and said his mother’s story reminded her of her own mother. In a short conversation, Flanagan says his books come out of the Tasmanian experience, “a world of community and connections”, and that he is putting “two new books into shape”. Edited excerpts: