Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan has won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his ‘savagely beautiful and haunting’ sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which tells the stories of prisoners and captors on the infamous Thai-Burma railway.
The philosopher AC Grayling, who chaired the judges, said: ‘The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war. Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism.’
The Narrow Road to the Deep North was also a favourite at Readings with our managing director Mark Rubbo including it as one of his top five books in 2013. Rubbo wrote: ‘This is an extremely powerful and, at times, confronting novel about the brutality of war and the nature of heroism.’
Flanagan is the third Australian to win the prize, alongside authors Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s Ark) and Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang)
