Richard Flanagan Longlist Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted?

Uplifting.

How did you conduct your research?

By living. The rest was work.

What challenges did you face in melding the elements of memory, dreams, history and science in your work?

Oddly, or perhaps not so, it felt more liberation than challenge. I gave myself over to the act of writing. One word follows another and in this way sentences, paragraphs, books, love affairs, wars and revolution ensue. After a time words began to levitate. In order that they might continue defying gravity I grew interested in how little I might leave on the page, how much I might pull out, and yet the story, Jenga-like, might continue soaring ever higher.

What was the reason you decided to write a love song to Tasmania?

I am not sure if I did decide that— or anything. In any case, nothing is of less importance to understanding a book than a writer’s original intentions. And besides, while Question 7 may be a love song it is also many other things, and they all exist together and only together have meaning for the reader.

The book explores the theme of love through the reoccurring question, "Who loves longer?" Why did you decide to use this question as a central motif?

Perhaps because it is unanswerable and elusive and yet speaks to what pulses thick and fast beneath our superficial world of timetables and appearances and duties, taking us to our secret world, our true reality.

‘What a mystery life is,’ Vincent Van Gogh wrote in one of his letters to his brother, Theo, ‘and love the mystery within the mystery.’