Category: Flanagan, Richard

‘I fly, I drive. We’re all complicit’: Richard Flanagan on vanishing species and refusing the Baillie Gifford prize money

Richard Flanagan has won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction with his book ‘Question 7’.

“This book is about my father and my mother,” he says, “their love for each other and the way they used love to find meaning in a world they knew to otherwise be meaningless. I think everyone is confronted at a certain point with the knowledge that the universe is empty of meaning. So the question is: how do we go on? They found meaning through kindness and goodness to each other and to others. They practised that love and they fought for that love for decades. It ceased to be what I thought was an illusion, and became their hard-fought-for reality. It became a truth – it was really a form of magic, and they the magicians. I realised it was an immense achievement. They came from very poor backgrounds: they understood the hardness and harshness of this life, yet they found wonder within it everywhere.”

Flanagan has delayed accepting the fifty thousand pounds prize until he is able to sit down with Ballie Giffard to discuss his climate crisis concerns over the company’s involvement in fossil fuels.

Read Alex Clark’s full article at The Guardian (21st November 2024).

Island launch ~ March 16, 1999

Dear Austlit listfolk,

A couple of notes on today’s ‘Island’ launch if anyone’s interested.

Richard Flanagan commented on Rodney Croome’s four year’s editorship, saying he had no doubt that “without Croome there would be no ‘Island'”, and that he gave ‘Island’ a Tasmanian focus while other journals were in danger of “dying a contagious death of fashionable similarity”.

Pete Hay said a case could be made that Tasmania has not been particularly well served by its intellectuals but that Croome’s editorship is important in that in a reflective and and creative way, he looked at the fundamental question of what it is to be Tasmanian, providing a journal which sought to interpret Tasmania for Tasmanians. He called ‘Island’ “a crucial cultural entity, the single most important interface between Tasmania and the rest of Australia”.

Croome was gracious, suggesting that without the efforts of (previous) deputy editor Fiona Cooke, “the magazine would definitely have died”. He recalled an interview with Anne Warburton four years ago when he began with the magazine. “It was one of Annie’s questions from out of left field. Will you make ‘Island’ more political?” What a strange question, Croome thought. “It’s always been fairly political, I won’t change that”. He began looking through previous issues of the journal … and now, at the end of four years, he’s come to the conclusion that there was far less gay writing published during his editorship, than before.

Russell Kelly takes over as stand-in editor in a move that may become permananent.

Ralph