Richard Flanagan: Question 7

“The finest Australian novelist of his generation.” (Economist)

Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan returns to Sydney Writers’ Festival to share his hypnotic, genre-defying new book Question 7, an homage to his parents and island home.

Join Richard as he discusses this original and all-consuming book in which memoir, biography, autofiction and history entwine through a daisy-chain of stories both personal and public. Opening with his father as a POW on the Death Railway, the book leads readers through the great literary love affair of HG Wells and Rebecca West, into nuclear physics of the 1930s and 40s, and finally towards a young Flanagan fighting for his life in Tasmanian river rapids.

Richard is lauded for his magical realist tale of climate crisis, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, and Booker Prize-winning window into the cruelty of war, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. His return to the Sydney Writers’ Festival stage comes after a sold-out closing address at the 2023 Festival.  

Richard will be in conversation with Spectrum arts and culture editor Melanie Kembrey.