“This prize money means I can continue to be a writer,” said Flanagan, who also worked as one of the screenwriters on Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia. He added: “In the end my father never asked me what the story was, he trusted me to write a book that might be true.”įlanagan wins £50,000, money he said would be spent on “life”, as he was not wealthy and had even, 18 months ago, considered trying to get work in the mines of northern Australia because he had spent so long on one book. He stressed that the novel was not his father’s story, although he had asked him lots of questions – “the nature of mud, the smell of rotting shin bone when a tropical ulcer has opened up, what sour rice tasted like for breakfast”. Over 12 years he wrote five drafts that he deemed deficient and burned, but he was intent on finishing before his father died. “We carried many incommunicable things and I realised at a certain point … that I would have to write this book.” “I grew up, as did my five siblings, as children of the Death Railway,” Flanagan said. He died aged 98 on the day Flanagan emailed his final draft to his publisher. The novel is an incredibly personal book for Flanagan, whose father was a survivor of Japan’s campaign to build the railway. “I just didn’t expect to end up the chicken.” “In Australia the Man Booker prize is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle,” he joked. He instinctively hugged the Duchess of Cornwall as he received the award at a black tie dinner in London.
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