AustLit

'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. 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. 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.' (Introduction)