Australian author Richard Flanagan wins $97,000 Baillie Gifford Prize but declines prize money

Australian author Richard Flanagan has won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, worth 50,000 British pounds ($97,000), for his latest book, Question 7.

But in his pre-recorded acceptance speech — the author is currently trekking through the Tasmanian wilderness — Flanagan said he had “delayed tak[ing] receipt of” the prize money until sponsor Baillie Gifford puts forward a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuels and increase investment in renewable energy.

“On that day, I will be grateful not only for this generous gift, but for the knowledge that by coming together in good faith, with respect and goodwill, it remains possible yet to make this world better,” he said.

“And were I not to speak of the terrifying impact fossil fuels are having on my island home, that same vanishing world that spurred me to write Question 7, I would be untrue to the spirit of my book.

“The world is complex. These matters are difficult. None of us are clean. All of us are complicit. Major booksellers that sell my books are owned by oil companies, major publishers that publish my friends are owned by fascists and authoritarians … As each of us is guilty, each of us too bears a responsibility to act.”

Baillie Gifford has sponsored the prize since 2016, but has recently been criticised for investing in fossil fuels and companies linked to Israel.

Earlier this year, following protests organised by Fossil Free Books, the company withdrew from its sponsorship of nine literary festivals in the UK, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The chair of the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize judges, journalist Isabel Hilton, asked her fellow judges if they had any concerns about supporting the prize in light of the investment management firm’s sponsorship.

“None of them did, and nor did I, frankly. So we got that conversation over with at the start, and then we concentrated on the books,” she said.

“These are serious books that need serious attention, and the Baillie Gifford Prize helps them to get that attention.”

By winning the prize, Flanagan becomes the first author to win both the Booker (for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in 2014) and the Baillie Gifford, since the latter was established in 1999.

Last year, it was won by John Vaillant, for his book about the climate crisis, Fire Weather, while other notable past winners include Helen Macdonald, in 2014, for H Is for Hawk, and the last Australian winner of the prize, Anna Funder, for Stasiland in 2004.

Flanagan beat a shortlist including a memoir by Pulitzer-Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and a biography of Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin.

Hilton praised the book for its “outstanding literary qualities and profound humanity”.

“Question 7 is an astonishingly accomplished meditation on memory, history, trauma, love and death – and an intricately woven exploration of the chains of consequence that frame a life.”

Everything is connected

In Question 7, Flanagan combines memoir, history and fiction to try to better understand his late parents — and through them, himself.

He traces the linkages between places and events as disparate as a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and Rebecca West visiting H.G. Wells in 1912; from the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima in 1945 to his own experience of nearly drowning as a young man.

He ponders whether he would have even been born if not for the atomic bomb. His father, a prisoner of war in WWII, who had also laboured on the Burma-Thailand Railway, was working in a coalmine in Japan about 130 kilometres south of Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped.

Flanagan told ABC Radio National’s The Book Show last year: “By that time, he was in a very bad way. And he told me many, many years later, if the war had gone on any longer, he would have died.

“I’ve long been aware that the great irony of my life is that I only exist because of that terrible crime that saw that bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and then the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and tens of thousands of innocent people murdered.”

Flanagan’s father’s experience in World War II also fed into Flanagan’s most celebrated book — soon to be turned into a TV series — The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

In 2014, when that book won him the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, Flanagan also used that opportunity to draw attention to social issues, donating his $40,000 prize to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

While Question 7 is a work of non-fiction, the author says he wrote the book “in the spirit of a novel”.

“It doesn’t seek to prosecute an argument or to propose answers. It’s something that asks questions and which journeys inwards.”

Those questions include: Why do we live? What does it mean to live? They’re the very same questions his father grappled with when he returned to Australia after the war, and that Flanagan also confronted when he was 21 years old and his kayak capsized in the Franklin River.

It’s a book that ultimately pays homage to his parents and to the mining town where he grew up in Tasmania, Longford, 20 kilometres south of Launceston, “In the middle of this most beautiful and extraordinary ancient world, which is vanishing as I speak”.

It was during COVID-19 that Flanagan became more aware he was taking the environment for granted and that it was under threat.

“I realised I now lived in the strange autumn of things,” he says. “And it seems to me that a great revolution had destroyed so much, and the revolution was so vast and its destruction so complete that we don’t even have a name for [it].”

Inspired by the way Vladimir Nabokov wrote about a Russia irrevocably changed by revolution in his memoir, Speak, Memory, Flanagan wanted to write about the environmental changes impacting on Australia and the world.

“I wanted to create something of a similar sense about this silent, nameless revolution that occurred to us,” he says.

That’s just the message he hopes Baillie Gifford hears.