Richard Flangan Wins 2014 Man Booker Prize

Richard Flangan Wins 2014 Man Booker Prize

Richard Flanagan has just been awarded the Man Booker Prize for the year 2014. The Man Booker Prize this year was the first to allow American nominees. This prize was won by Flanagan for his “magnificent novel of love and war” in a compeling tale about prisoners and captors in Burma. The prize was won by the Australian writer for his work entitled “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”. Flangan became the third Australian to win the prize after Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey.

“In Australia the Man Booker prize is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle,” Flanagan joked. “I just didn’t expect to end up the chicken.” The novel is a personal narrative for the author whose father was a survivor of the Burma railway which the Japanese were aiming to build. “I grew up, as did my five siblings, as children of the Death Railway,” the author said to the media “We carried many incommunicable things and I realised at a certain point … that I would have to write this book.”

The author emphasises that the novel was not his father’s story, although he had asked his father many queries – “the nature of mud, the smell of rotting shin bone when a tropical ulcer has opened up, what sour rice tasted like for breakfast”.

Flanagan added “In the end my father never asked me what the story was, he trusted me to write a book that might be true.”

Flanagan won £50,000 as part of the prize and said “This prize money means I can continue to be a writer”. Philosopher AC Grayling, who chaired the judges, called Flanagan's book “an absolutely superb novel, a really outstanding work of literature”.

This is the sixth novel by this author. Favourites to win the prize were
Howard Jacobson, Ali Smith and Neel Mukherjee, while the two Americans – Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler – were not considered likely to win.

Grayling added the process of reading and then re-reading twice exposed “the genuine quality in a book”.

He said “The best and worst of judging books is when you come across one that kicks you so hard you can’t pick up the next one on the pile for a couple of days, it delays you but you know you’ve met something extraordinary. That’s what happened in the case of this book.”

Man Booker shortlisted authors this year were Ali Smith, Neel Mukherjee, Howard Jacobson, Karen Joy Fowler. Richard Flanagan and Joshua Ferris.