Lowy Lecture Series: Richard Flanagan in conversation with Michael Fullilove

This Remembrance Day, author of the acclaimed novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan, will join the Lowy Institute’s Executive Director Michael Fullilove to reflect on memory, war, the Australian character, and the relationship between fiction and history.

Richard Flanagan is one of Australia’s finest novelists. He has also worked as a film director and journalist, writing for The Guardian (UK), The Telegraph (UK), The New Yorker, La Repubblica and Le Monde among others. His novels are published in over twenty countries and have received numerous honours. They include Death of a River Guide (1997), The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998), Gould's Book of Fish (2002), The Unknown Terrorist (2007) and Wanting (2009).

His most recent novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) was inspired by his father’s experiences as a prisoner of war. Described as ‘savagely beautiful and haunting’, the book’s story is enacted against the backdrop of a century of Australian history, with one day in a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway at its heart, and addresses themes of love, death, and war.

Michael Fullilove is the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He is an author, most recently of Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World (Viking, 2013).p>