Richard Flanagan in Conversation

Where

When

Monday, 9 Oct 2017, 07:30pm - 08:30pm

Event Status

Past event

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

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.

Michael Williams

Michael Williams joined Sydney Writers’ Festival in September 2020, as the Artistic Director navigating the post-pandemic landscape going into the 2021 festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne; as its founding Head of Programming in 200... Read more

@mmccwill