This year’s Man Booker Prize was given to Richard Flanagan of Australia, for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. He is the third Australian to win the award. Chair of the judges, A.C. Grayling called his book “the sort… that kicks you so hard in the stomach.” Based on Flanagan’s father’s life, the book recounts experiences on the so-called Burma Death Railway, a Japanese war camp from the Second World War, in which Flanagan’s father, a surgeon, was imprisoned.

The shortlist included five other books: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, J by Howard Jacobson, The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee, and How to be Both by Ali Smith. In his acceptance speech, Flanagan said, “I do not come out of a literary tradition. I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate…. [L]ife, like novels, confounds us. That fractious tribe of writers is not readily given to fraternity. But I was honored to be a writer amongst the writers on this short list.”

His novel, he told The Guardian, took him twelve years and five drafts. He claimed he actually burned, on a barbecue, each printed-out unsuccessful version of the book.

Read more about the winner and the finalists at the Booker Prize website, and read Flanagan’s interview with The Guardian the day after the award announcement.

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