Richard Flanagan

Flanagan grew up in the small mining town of Rosebery, Tasmania, a fifth-generation descendant of Irish convicts, and worked as a wilderness river guide on the Franklin River before studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and turning to fiction full time.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) draws on his father's imprisonment as a POW on the Thai-Burma railway during the Second World War, following a doctor-prisoner through the camp's brutality and its long shadow over the rest of his life; Flanagan finished the manuscript the same day his ninety-eight-year-old father died, and the novel won the Booker Prize the following year.

He has continued writing fiction and journalism sharply critical of Tasmanian environmental and political controversies, remaining one of Australia's most prominent literary voices.