Richard Flanagan: The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

This event is broadcast from 7pm AEST, 29 September 2020, and available on demand until Tuesday 13 October 9pm AEDT.

Viewers will need to set up an account through Fane Productions. Instructions will be sent to ticket holders and are available here. 

In September, we’re thrilled to present one of our finest living writers, Richard Flanagan, in conversation with award-winning journalist and broadcaster Jennifer Byrne.

Flanagan is perhaps best known for his 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about Australian prisoners of war forced to build the Thai-Burma railway track during World War II. That novel was a work of unflinching, sometimes harrowing, realism, and a deeply researched masterclass in historical fiction. In Flanagan’s other books, however, he’s often delved into magic realism or blurred notions of fact and fiction, especially in the much-loved 2001 novel, Gould’s Book of Fish, and the 2017 fictional mock-memoir, First Person.

Flanagan’s new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, again embraces strange and surreal elements. It’s about vanishing species and vanishing selves; about a woman who sees herself, and others, disappearing – in part and in full. 

Join this shape-shifting storyteller as he discusses his highly anticipated new work.

#RichardFlanagan

Presented in partnership with Fane Productions.

Our online bookseller for this event will be Readings.