Richard Flanagan

Flanagan's achievements are remarkable not just for their quantity but for their singularity. He stands alone as the only author to have won both the Man Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize, a feat that underscores his ability to move between fiction and non-fiction with equal mastery. His Booker win for The Narrow Road to the Deep North was widely seen as a landmark moment for Australian literature, and the novel has been included in numerous 'best of the decade' lists. The Economist has called him potentially the finest Australian novelist of his generation, a judgment that many readers and critics share.