Heresies by Richard Flanagan

Heresies brings together twenty years of Richard Flanagan's non-fiction: essays, articles and speeches from one of Australia's major writers, and the only person to have won both the Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction.

The range is wide. Manus Island and MONA, birds and the Black Summer fires, the loss of the natural world and the hope he finds in Indigenous Australia, Salman Rushdie, the Segal Report, democracy under strain, family and love. Running underneath is an argument for heresy itself: that writing matters most when it says the things we are not supposed to say.

The pieces carry Flanagan's usual mix of elegance, wit and feeling, and together they read as a portrait of the times as much as of the writer.

Non-fiction and essays for readers of Flanagan's Question 7 and The Narrow Road to the Deep North.