Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 06 October
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
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 Bendigo Town Hall, join one of Australia’s leading literary talents on his exploration into the meaning, and the problem, of truth. In conversation with Cate Kennedy.
Presented in partnership with Bendigo Writers Festival.
Featuring
Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan's novels have received numerous honours and are published in forty-two countries. He won the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish. A rapid on the Franklin River is named after him.
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Cate Kennedy
Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely.
Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and is currently a text on the VCE Literature syllabus.
She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2011. Her most recent book is her second collection of stories, Like a House on Fire (Scribe, 2012), which won the Queensland Literary Award and was shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize, and is also on the Victorian school syllabus, as a Year 12 English text.
She lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, with her daughter, and is working on a new novel.