Interview | Richard Flanagan: The writer’s only job is to be not boring

Before Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan sat down to write his 2023 book Question 7, he was on a clock.

He had been handed down a diagnosis of early onset dementia and was given 12 months to settle his affairs before things got worse. The shocking news made him want to write a book about “what it is to live and what it is to love”.

The book, part memoir, part history, part travelogue, won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. Soon after he finished writing it, his doctor clarified that there was no onset of dementia — in fact, it had been a radiologist’s mistaken reading of an MRI.

But he used the 11 months prior to the clarification “to write about kindness, gratitude and other values of humanity,” through the life stories of his father, mother and himself. He looked into periods of light and darkness (his father’s internment at a Japanese camp; how he himself wished to be a writer, “absurdly”, when he was four, his mother’s extraordinary courage, and he recalls an instance when he nearly drowned). The book is dedicated to the person who saved his life.

In 2014, Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize for his novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, where the protagonist is a Japanese prisoner of war at a camp on the Burma Death Railway. Last year, the book was adapted into a web series starring Jacob Elordi, Odessa Young and Ciarán Hinds.

On the sidelines of the recent Jaipur Literature Festival, Flanagan said that he was moved when a reader walked up to him and said his mother’s story reminded her of her own mother. In a short conversation, Flanagan says his books come out of the Tasmanian experience, “a world of community and connections”, and that he is putting “two new books into shape”. Edited excerpts:

You have drawn material from your own life, in both your fiction and non-fiction works. How did that come about?

Like with everyone, some things remain with us, and some things matter to us, and as we grow older, we wonder why. Question 7 is really just an enquiry into my own life and the world I came from.

I think books are just an expression of life; when books succeed, they succeed because they reflect the chaos and mystery at the heart of ourselves.

People go to books because they discover that the thoughts that are tormenting them, the feelings that seem inexplicable or incommunicable, others have these thoughts and feelings too. They realise they are not alone, and that’s a beautiful and miraculous thing.

Question 7 is a lot about your mother too.

I wanted to write about her life. She was trapped in oppressive ideas of gender and domesticity, and it doesn’t justify the prison she was in, but she transcended it. I am moved by how some people have this capacity and dignity to be refused to be jailed; that’s what my mother did. It doesn’t vindicate or justify the roles she had to play, but it does show what human beings are capable of doing.

Chekov, from whose short story you take the title, believed that the role of literature is not to provide answers but to ask questions. What are the questions you are asking?

I am asking about life, you know. Why do we do some of the things we do? Why do we obliterate shameful pasts? In my own country, Australia, there are so many horrific crimes committed against indigenous people that we still don’t talk about, that have been obliterated from memory. I guess when you are confronted with a crime, if you look at it long enough, you merely see reflected in it your face as a criminal. Perhaps, that’s a good thing because great crimes come over and over from this same notion — that we are better than other people and that they are less; that we have values that are superior to theirs; that we are the victims and they are the monsters. Yet, every one of us is a murderer and the murdered. Cruelty is unshackled when we think it’s unique to other people or nations or groups, for that allows us to pretend that somehow we are superior to other humans. But once you have that arrogance, great crimes become possible.

Jacob Elordi and Odessa Young in a web adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

So is it a writer’s responsibility to see stories are not forgotten?

I worry when I hear talk about writers having any responsibility, because I think writers should be irresponsible. I don’t think literature should be bound by morality or ethics. Novels really only have one duty which is not to be boring. For writers, their job beyond that is simply to report truthfully, be true to their own selves, to ask the right questions, and not to pretend that they have any of the answers.

Why do the Latin American writers particularly speak to you?

I was always interested in writing, but I realise now that I wasn’t interested in English writing because it felt that it was the voice of the occupying power. So, I turned to the Latin Americans and some Europeans because although their histories and worlds were different to mine, they spoke to my experience. They had a language and a way of telling stories that seemed to be describing to me my own world. Writers like Borges, Cortazar, Marquez — they were so important to me. It was as if they were writing about Tasmania. One of the loveliest things for me is that I write about this tiny, benighted part of the world, but to have readers in India, China or Armenia, for them to find themselves in my books, that is the greatest honour for me.

sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in

Published – February 26, 2026 03:59 pm IST