BBC Online :
Australian author Richard Flanagan has won the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for his wartime novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
AC Grayling, chair of the judges, said it was a “remarkable love story as well as a story about human suffering and comradeship”.
Flanagan’s novel is set during the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War Two.
It was announced as the winner on Tuesday at London’s Guildhall.
Flanagan, 53, was presented with his prize by The Duchess of Cornwall.
“In Australia the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle,” Flanagan said. “I just didn’t expect to end up the chicken.”
The book was inspired by the author’s father, a Japanese prisoner of war who survived the Death Railway, but died aged 98 on the day the novel was finished.
The railway between Bangkok in Thailand and Rangoon in Burma was built by Japan in 1943 to support its forces, using forced labour. More than 100,000 people died during its construction.
‘Truth in detail’
“The battle was to write something that wasn’t [my father’s] story but, at the same time, true to the fundamental spiritual truth of his experience,” Flanagan told the BBC.
“He trusted me, he never asked me what the story was. But I did talk to him often about very small things.
“What the mud was like, what the smell of a rotting tropical ulcer that had eaten through to the shin bone exactly was. What a tiny ball of sour rice would taste like when you’re starving, what starvation felt like in your belly and your brain.
“It was those things I talked to him about because I think truth exists in those small but very real physical details.”
Grayling said the judges reached a majority decision after three hours of debate.
“The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war,” he said.
“Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism.”
