author of the narrow road to the deep north

As with Gould's Book of Fish, there were ructions within the Australian literary community critics and prize judges were again deeply divided over the literary merit of Flanagan's work, their differences showing how broad a spectrum the term 'literary merit' can cover. There, it initially lost out to Steven Carroll's novel A World of Other People, until the personal intervention of the then prime minister, Tony Abbott, who ruled that the two novels should share the fiction prize. The Narrow Road to the Deep North scooped an even bigger pool of prizes, winning the Man Booker and several national prizes and being shortlisted for several more, including the fiction section of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. But that novel had also been Flanagan's most successful until his Booker win, garnering two major national awards as well the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Nor was it the first time that one of his novels had caused deep division among readers and critics the influential Australian critic and reviewer Peter Craven had savaged Gould's Book of Fish in a review for The Age. When Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, it was not the first time that he had won an international fiction prize his third novel, Gould's Book of Fish (2001), won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002.

Author of the narrow road to the deep north