Flanagan, Richard

Richard Flanagan was the fifth of six children. He was educated at state schools, leaving school at the age of sixteen to work as a labourer in the bush. He later returned to further his education at the University of Tasmania and went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship. As well as his novels, which have won both national and international acclaim, Flanagan has also published a history of the Tasmanian Green Movement , The Rest of the World Is Watching (1990), with Cassandra Pybus, A Terrible Beauty: History of the Gordon River Country (1985) and On the Mountain (1996), a pictorial and natural history of Mount Wellington, with Jamie Kirkpatrick and photographs by Peter Dombrovskis.