20 Facts About Richard Flanagan

Richard Miller Flanagan was born on 1961 and is an Australian writer, who has worked as a film director and screenwriter.

Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

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 a 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 was president of the Tasmania University Union in 1983.

Richard Flanagan graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with First-Class Honours.

Richard Flanagan wrote four non-fiction works before moving to fiction, works that he called "his apprenticeship".

Richard Flanagan's next book, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which tells the story of Slovenian immigrants, was a major bestseller, selling more than 150,000 copies in Australia.

Richard Flanagan has written on literature, the environment, art and politics for the Australian and international press including Le Monde, 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.

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.