Aussie Author Richard Flanagan Just Won The Man Booker Prize, Has Some Words For Tony Abbott About Climate Change

This morning news came through that Australian author Richard Flanagan has won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a novel that tells the stories of Australian prisoners of war forced to work on the infamous Thai-Burma Railway in World War Two.

Flanagan joins illustrious company. The Man Booker is arguably fiction’s most prestigious literary award, and has only been won by Australians four times before — DBC Pierre in 2003 for Vernon God Little, Thomas Keneally in 1982 for Schindler’s Ark, and Peter Carey in 1998 and 2001 for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, respectively. Sales of Booker-winning novels regularly go through the roof once they win, and the writers often find themselves in a whole new level of spotlight, especially in the UK and the United States.

So Flanagan’s first post-Booker interview with BBC Two’s Newsnight was always going to get a lot of buzz. But things went up a notch when interviewer Kristy Wark asked Flanagan what he thought of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent comments that coal is “good for humanity”.

“I’m very saddened because Australia has the most extraordinary environment and I don’t understand why our government seems committed to destroying what we have that’s unique in the world. It doesn’t have to be this way — we can grow our economy but we can do so much for our extraordinary environment,” Flanagan said.

“To be frank, I’m ashamed to be Australian when you bring this up.”

Watch video of the interview here:

Flanagan is a vocal environmentalist who’s especially concerned with the destruction of Tasmania’s old-growth forests; in May last year he penned a longform piece for The Monthly called “The Tragedy of Tasmania’s Forests: Out of Control”, which you can read here. Wark asked Flanagan about his thoughts on the new Tasmanian Liberal government’s decision to tear up an historic 2013 forestry agreement between environmentalists and loggers that created around 400,000 hectares of forest reserves.

“I genuinely believe that the people of Australia want these beautiful places, these sacred places, preserved,” Flanagan told Wark. “That the politics of the day is so foolishly going ahead and seeking to destroy when there’s not even an economic base to it — there’s no market for the woodchips that will result from the destruction of these forests — I think it’s unnecessary, and I think it’s just politics being used to divide people who could otherwise be brought together on all that is best and most extraordinary in our country.”

You kind of forget that the dumb stuff Australia gets up to can be seen by the rest of the world, but people are really starting to pay attention to just how dreadfully Australia’s performing on climate change — Slate called us the Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific last month, and G20 leaders are reportedly pretty pissed that climate change isn’t on the agenda for the upcoming summit  in Brisbane. We might be due for another embarrassing John Oliver video after this.

–

H/t The Guardian.