2014 Man Booker Prize Tuesday Oct 14,2014

 

Australian author Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, set during the building of the Thailand-Burma “Death Railway” in WWII, won Britain’s prestigious £50,000 ($79,530) Man Booker literature prize on Tuesday Oct 14,2014
 

Australian author Richard Flanagan(53) is ranked among Australia’s finest novelists and also worked as a writer with director Baz Luhrmann on the 2008 film Australia.

His father, who was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway, died at age 98, the day Mr. Flanagan finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 

Australian author Richard Flanagan’s sixth novel beat out what jury chairman Anthony Grayling said was a strong shortlist of six books that for the first time, under a rule change, included works by two Americans, giving rise to fears beforehand that the British prize might come to be dominated by American writers

 

The other books on the short list were We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Jay Fowler (American), To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris (American), J by Howard Jacobson (British), The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee (British} and How to be Both by Ali Smith (British)
 

Man Booker authors: (clockwise from top left) Joshua Ferris, Richard Flanagan, Neel Mukherjee, Ali Smith, Howard Jacobson, Karen Joy Fowler

Man Booker Prize shortlist 2014
Author	Title	Nationality
Joshua Ferris	To Rise Again at a Decent Hour	American
Richard Flanagan	The Narrow Road to the Deep North	Australian
Karen Joy Fowler	We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves	American
Howard Jacobson	J	British
Neel Mukherjee	The Lives of Others	British
Ali Smith	How to be Both	British

The Narrow Road to the Deep North
By Richard Flanagan

Published by Chatto & Windus
About the book: Taking its title from a book by the haiku poet Basho, Flanagan's novel is a love story set against the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War Two. In a Japanese POW camp, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier.
About the author: Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961. His previous novels include Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting. His father, a survivor of the Burma Death Railway, died the day Flanagan finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North.