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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows.
'By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.
'At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Author's note: For Phil Cullen
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording. (Read by the author)
Works about this Work
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y
Richard Flanagan at The Capitol Discussing 'Question 7'
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2024
27446496
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'Richard Flanagan is a Tasmania writer. Question 7, his latest work, was published in 2023 and will no doubt become that rare thing - a commercial bestseller that attracts critical acclaim.' (Introduction)
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Question 7, by Richard Flanagan : A Love Note from Tasmania’s Greatest Nature Writer
2024
single work
column
— Appears in: Forty South Tasmania (Online) 2024;'I was asked recently who I thought was the greatest nature writer in Tasmania. I scratched my head and thought: who is it that emerges above the rest as someone who best understands and articulates the haunting beauty and mystery of this ancient island’s environment? Who understands deeply the captivating endemics of this island and has been able to write best about it?' (Introduction)
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Double-sighted in the Deep South
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Inside Story , December 2023;
— Review of Question 7 2023 single work prose'Richard Flanagan’s latest book is an extraordinary meditation on Tasmania in the world'
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Who Loves Longer? In Conversation with Richard Flanagan
Michael McGirr
(interviewer),
2023
single work
interview
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 27 November vol. 33 no. 23 2023; 'Michael McGirr spoke with Richard Flanagan about his new book, Question 7. When I get a chance to sit down with Richard Flanagan, he reminds of a previous meeting, some years ago, when he quoted the words of his grandmother, who said, ‘never trust a Jesuit’. I was a Jesuit at the time and apparently I replied that I agreed because I had learned not to trust myself.' (Introduction) -
Booker Prize Winner Asks Hard Questions of His Own Life
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 25-26 November 2023; (p. 15)
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The Atomic Bomb and a Near-death Experience Shadow Richard Flanagan’s Autobiographical Question 7
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 6 November 2023;
— Review of Question 7 2023 single work prose'The most astonishing and accomplished sequence in Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 arrives near the book’s end, as he describes the near-death experience that inspired his first novel, Death of a River Guide, published in 1994.' (Introduction)
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The Measure of Things : Flanagan’s Looping Book of Questions
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 459 2023; (p. 9-10)
— Review of Question 7 2023 single work prose'When Richard Flanagan left school, he tells us early in Question 7, he worked as a chainman or surveyor’s labourer, ‘a job centuries old set to vanish only a few years later with the advent of digital technology’. Chainmen would have followed the surveyors who mapped Van Diemen’s Land and the rest of the British Empire; their task was to ‘drag the twenty-two-yard chain with its hundred links with which the world was measured’. The clanking surveyor’s measure evokes convict chains, and it demonstrates one of the principles at the heart of this book: that the past lives and redounds in the present. The chainman is a descendant of convicts, and he insists that ‘there was no straight line of history. There was only a circle.’' (Introduction)
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‘A Book the World Needs Now’, ‘Tender’ and ‘Profound’ : The Best Australian Books Out in November
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 7 November 2023;
— Review of Question 7 2023 single work prose ; The In-Between 2023 single work novel ; The Conversion 2023 single work novel -
Richard Flanagan Question 7
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 25 November - 1 December 2023;
— Review of Question 7 2023 single work prose'Who could be grateful for the bombing of Hiroshima at 8.15am on August 6, 1945: an unprecedented, world-changing act of warfare that saw, as Richard Flanagan puts it, “60,000 Japanese souls ascending to heaven”? Flanagan might be.' (Introduction)
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The New Books Our Avid Readers and Critics Couldn't Put down in November
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: ABC News [Online] , November 2023;
— Review of The Conversion 2023 single work novel ; Women and Children 2023 single work novel ; Question 7 2023 single work prose -
y
The Measure of Things
Southbank
:
Australian Book Review, Inc.
,
2023
27232631
2023
single work
podcast
'In this week’s ABR Podcast, Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Richard Flanagan’s new hybrid work Question 7. Menzies-Pike argues that Flanagan’s ‘sweeping engagement with history ultimately brings the author back to himself’ in ways that limit understanding of the present tense. Catriona Menzies-Pike is a literary critic and former editor of the Sydney Review of Books. Listen to ‘The Measure of things: Flanagan’s looping book of questions’, published in the November issue of ABR.' (Production summary)
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Soul Shifts : Reflections on Richard Flanagan’s Question 7
2023
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 460 2023; (p. 27-28)'Thirty years ago, wanting to probe deeper into the question of what it meant to make home in Tasmania, I enrolled to do my honours year at the University of Tasmania. During a discussion with the secretary of the History Department about my partially formed dissertation ideas, she urged me to read a thesis by a recent graduate whose work had greatly impressed her: one Richard Flanagan. When I read the thesis and the book that came out of it, the result can best be described as a soul shift. It was not so much the information I gained but that Flanagan’s approach to Tasmania’s past released an imaginative flow in my own research, allowing it to slowly metamorphose over fifteen years into my first book, Van Diemen’s Land. I share this anecdote, not just to highlight what was lost when universities sacked most of their administrative staff, but to show how seriously Richard Flanagan has always taken history.' (Introduction)
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y
The Cause and Effect of Richard Flanagan
Michael Williams
(interviewer),
2023
27242293
2023
single work
podcast
interview
'Described by the Washington Post as "one of our greatest living novelists", Richard Flanagan has been writing for more than three decades. His 2013 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the Booker Prize and his essays have been published across Australia and internationally. This week Michael heads to Tasmania to speak with Richard at his home in Hobart about his latest and most personal novel, Question 7.' (Publication abstract)
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Booker Prize Winner Asks Hard Questions of His Own Life
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 25-26 November 2023; (p. 15) -
Who Loves Longer? In Conversation with Richard Flanagan
Michael McGirr
(interviewer),
2023
single work
interview
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 27 November vol. 33 no. 23 2023; 'Michael McGirr spoke with Richard Flanagan about his new book, Question 7. When I get a chance to sit down with Richard Flanagan, he reminds of a previous meeting, some years ago, when he quoted the words of his grandmother, who said, ‘never trust a Jesuit’. I was a Jesuit at the time and apparently I replied that I agreed because I had learned not to trust myself.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2024 shortlisted Booksellers Choice Award BookPeople Book of the Year — Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year
- 2024 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) — Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year
- 2024 longlisted APA Book Design Awards — Best Designed Non Fiction Book designed by Adam Laszczuk.
- Tasmania,
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cJapan,cEast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,