Richard Flanagan: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan's inspiration came from a deeply painful and personal place. His father Archie was one of thousands of Allied POW's forced to work on the "Death Railway", a 415 km rail-line cut through dense jungle and rock between Thailand and Burma. Men were tortured and starved until they were nothing more than "skeletons in the mud". 

Flanagan told Michael Enright that his job was to describe the hardship, 

The stench of a leg ulcer that's rotting into a shinbone, the taste of sour rice in a starving belly, the way sharp limestone might cut a foot.- Richard Flanagan

Tens of thousands of men died there, but his father survived. It was his stories, that led his son to write The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which won the 2014 Booker Prize. 

It is a story of terrible cruelty, but Flanagan also weaves an optimistic thread through the book, saying, "I think, at the heart of us is hope. Nietzsche said hope is the cruelest of human torments because it inevitably prolongs suffering, there's truth in that, but nevertheless it is the nub of us, and without it we become the walking dead."

His conversation with Michael Enright took place during a rare visit to Canada.

.