Australian Richard Flanagan was announced winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’.
At an awards dinner at London’s Guildhall on Tuesday, Flanagan was presented with a trophy and a £50,000 check. The Tasmanian-born author is the third Australian to win the coveted prize, the prize website wrote.
It’s the sixth book by Flanagan, who is considered by many to be one of Australia’s finest novelists. The book centers upon the experiences of a surgeon in a Japanese prison of war (POW) camp on the now infamous Thailand-Burma railway. The Financial Times calls it “elegantly wrought, measured and without an ounce of melodrama … nothing short of a masterpiece.”
The 2014 judges of the prize described the book as “a harrowing account of the cost of war to all who are caught up in it.” Questioning the meaning of heroism, the book explores what motivates acts of extreme cruelty and shows that perpetrators may be as much victims as those they abuse. Flanagan’s father, who died the day he finished the book, was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway.
The Booker Prize is awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK. The winner is generally assured of international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade.
