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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/20/richard-flanagan-baillie-gifford-refusing-prize-money-death-railway>
"Richard Flanagan had only just got home from a trek through the wilderness
when “the phone started going off like a chainsaw revving”. The day before, he
had been standing in a grove of 1,000-year-old pencil pines, trees that he
fears may not be around in a decade, such is the effect of the climate crisis
on alpine heathland and rainforest in his native Tasmania, Australia. But now,
on the other side of the world, his book
Question 7 had just been awarded the
Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, making him the first writer to win both
this and the Booker, which he received in 2014 for
The Narrow Road to the Deep
North.
Flanagan’s prerecorded acceptance speech initially followed customary form,
thanking the prize’s judging panel, his fellow shortlisted writers and its
sponsors, the investment management company that gives the award its name and
which in recent times has become the focus of intense scrutiny over its ties to
the fossil fuel industry. His soul would be troubled, Flanagan explained, if he
did not draw attention to the devastating impact the climate crisis was having
on his own country and to urge Baillie Gifford to meet with him and outline a
plan for its withdrawal from any involvement in fossil fuels. Until that time,
continued the 63-year-old, he would delay taking receipt of the £50,000 prize
money. “As each of us is guilty,” he concluded, “each of us too bears a
responsibility to act: a writer, a fund manager.”
“I don’t see Baillie Gifford as the enemy,” Flanagan tells me as we talk over
Zoom the morning after the awards ceremony. “I think their support of
literature has been well meant. It’s an offer to come together and to remind
each other of what’s possible. I don’t arrive at it from any position of moral
superiority, because we’re all complicit: I fly in planes, I drive a car, I
live surrounded by plastic and I think these matters are extraordinarily
complex. But I can’t write a book such as
Question 7, which in part deals
with the catastrophe of climate, with the destruction and vanishing of the
world I love, and not mention it and not act upon it.”
Question 7 is highly attuned to this weighing of responsibility and
complicity. It takes its title from a Chekhov story that juxtaposes a mental
arithmetic problem about train times with the unanswerable question: “Who loves
longer, a man or a woman?” From this, Flanagan extrapolates a multistranded
meditation on how we might ever arrive at a moral calculus, based on the
experiences of his father, a prisoner-of-war in a Japanese slave labour camp
who was nearing death when the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
ultimately liberating him to return home to Tasmania, marry and have children.
How can the uncountable lives lost to the bomb be set against his father’s –
and, therefore, his own – existence?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
