Australian writer Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize on Tuesday with a visceral novel about wartime brutality and its aftermath – the head of the judging team said it was as powerful as a kick in the stomach.
Flanagan drew on his father's experiences as a Second World War prisoner of the Japanese for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which is about the Burma Death Railway, built with forced labour at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.
Named after a classic work of Japanese literature, the book is dedicated to Flanagan’s father – referred to by his prisoner number, 335 – who died at the age of 98, soon after his son finished writing the book.
Flanagan said that he and his five siblings grew up “children of the Death Railway. We carried in consequence many incommunicable things”.
"I realised at a certain point if I was to continue writing, I would have to write this book," said Flanagan, whose previous credits include five novels and the screenplay to Baz Luhrmann's Australia.
He said the novel was not his father’s story, “because that would have been a failure ... He trusted me to write a book that might be true”.
The philosopher A C Grayling, who chaired the panel of judges, praised the “profoundly intelligent humanity” and “excoriating” descriptions of suffering in Flanagan’s novel.
He said the book, which moves from Tasmania to South East Asia to Japan, explored “the loss of a love and then the loss of comrades” and the trauma of having to live with such an overwhelming experience.
“If you are made a hero by your country but you don’t feel like one – that is explored so wonderfully well in this novel,” he said, adding that it was “the sort of book that kicks you so hard in the stomach” that it is difficult to move on.
Flanagan, 53, was given his trophy and £50,000 (Dh292,536) winner’s cheque by Prince Charles’s wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, after a black-tie dinner in London’s medieval Guildhall. This was the first year writers of all nationalities had been eligible for the Booker, previously open only to authors from Britain and the Commonwealth nations.
