NEWNOVEL EMERGES FROM FIERY SUMMER

THE Tasmanian who won the world’ s most prestigious literary prize six years ago is back with his eighth novel.

Critics are already raving about Man Booker Prizewinner Richard Fl an ag an’ s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams.

“This nov elisa revelation and triumph from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register ,” reviewer Michael Williams said.

The family drama follows the demi se of an elderly woman in a Hobart hospital and the impact on her three adult children. It is set against a back drop of an Australia on fire.

“During the Tasmanian fires everything came to a head and you could see that we were now facing a moment of immense loss and that we are truly in the autumn of things ,” Flanagan said .“My difficulty as a writer was finding a language that would speak both of this immense loss and this grief that a lot of people feel, and at the same time speak of possibility and hope .”

Flanagan started writing the book while staying on Ma at suyker Island ,5 km off Tasmania’ s south coast, at the height of the Tasmanian fires in early 2019.

“By autumn it was clear the summer we were going to have on mainland Australia ,” he said .“Even a fool of a novelist in Tasmania could see that it was going to be terrible.

“So my idea was I would sketch the novel out and have it roughly ready and then I would rewrite it in real time last summer, and I would let whatever happened in fuse the novel .”

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