Heresies: Richard Flanagan in Conversation with Richard Fidler
Date: Monday, August 24
Time: 6-8pm
Location: Avalon Beach Surf Club
Tickets Here

From the only author ever to have won both the Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize (Britain’s leading prize for non-fiction) comes a dazzling collection of writing, essays, articles and speeches.

From Manus to MONA to birds to the Black Summer, from the destruction of our natural world to the hope offered by Indigenous Australia to the growing corrosion of democracy, from Salman Rushdie to the Segal Report, family and love, Flanagan’s non-fiction writings carry the author’s trademark elegance, subversive wit, and humanity.

This showcase of Richard Flanagan’s heretical brilliance over twenty years speaks to the heart of our troubled times now.

‘Heresy allows a writer to write freely, allows writing to be an act of joy that arises from the same deep place where laughter lives, countering the farce of dogma with the reality of life … Perhaps for any of us to write of hope, to write of love, we must learn once more to be free, and to embrace heresy.’

Richard Flanagan has been described by the Washington Post as ‘one of our greatest living novelists’ and as ‘among the most versatile writers in the English language’ by theNewYork Review of Books. He won the Commonwealth Prize forGould’s Book of Fish and the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Question 7 was shortlisted for the Prix Femina étranger and the Prix du meilleur livre étranger as a novel, and won the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is the first and only author to have ever won both the Booker and the Baillie Gifford prizes.

Richard Fidler is the author of several best-selling books that blend history with travel writing and mythology. His books include Ghost Empire, his history of Constantinople, and The Golden Maze: a Biography of Prague. Richard also co-wrote Saga Land with his friend Kári Gíslason, the story of their journey into the sagas of Iceland. His most recent history is The Book of Roads & Kingdoms.

Throughout the week, Richard presents Conversations on ABC Radio. Millions of episodes of the Conversations podcast are downloaded every month.

In 2026, Richard and Kári Gíslason launched a new history podcast series Viking Lives, exploring the great arc of Viking history through a chain of their life stories.