1. Richard Miller Flanagan was born on 1961 and is an Australian writer, who won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Question 7, making him the first writer in history to win both Britain's major fiction and non-fiction prizes.
Richard Flanagan has worked as a film director and screenwriter.
Richard Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961, the fifth of six children.
Richard Flanagan is descended from Irish convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land during the Great Famine in Ireland.
Richard Flanagan's father was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway and one of his three brothers is Australian rules football journalist Martin Richard Flanagan.
Richard Flanagan was born with severe hearing loss, which was corrected when he was six years old.
Richard Flanagan grew up in the remote mining town of Rosebery on Tasmania's western coast.
Richard Flanagan left school at the age of 16 but returned to study at the University of Tasmania, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with First-Class Honours.
Richard Flanagan was president of the Tasmania University Union in 1983.
Richard Flanagan wrote four non-fiction works before moving to fiction, works that he called "his apprenticeship".
Richard Flanagan has written on literature, the environment, art and politics for the Australian and international press including, The Daily Telegraph, Suddeutsche Zeitung, The Monthly, The New York Times, and the New Yorker.
Richard Flanagan's essay won the 2008 John Curtin Prize for Journalism.
The book features sketches made by the noted Australian artist Ben Quilty, who travelled with Richard Flanagan to meet the refugees.
However Richard Flanagan declared that he would not accept the prize money until Baillie Gifford shared with the public a plan showing how they will decrease their investment in fossil fuel extraction and increase their investment in renewable energy.
The 1998 film of The Sound of One Hand Clapping, written and directed by Richard Flanagan, was nominated for the Golden Bear at that year's Berlin Film Festival.
Richard Flanagan worked with Baz Luhrmann as a writer on the 2008 film Australia.
Richard Flanagan is an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, to which he donated his $40,000 prize money on winning the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Prize in 2014.
Richard Flanagan was made an Honorary Citizen of Oxford, Mississippi, the home town of William Faulkner, in 2014.
Richard Flanagan lives in Hobart, Tasmania with his Slovenian-born wife Majda and has three daughters, Rosie, Jean and Eliza.
Richard Flanagan's life was the subject of a BAFTA award-winning BBC documentary, Life After Death.