Acclaimed author Richard Flanagan has refused to accept almost $100,000 for winning a British literature award until the prize’s major sponsor releases a plan to divest from fossil fuels.
Flanagan won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for his latest book Question 7 at a ceremony in London on Tuesday night (Wednesday AEDT).
Richard Flanagan calls Question 7 a “love note to my parents and my island home”.Credit: Adam Gibson
But in a pre-recorded acceptance speech, the Booker Prize-winner said he “will delay taking receipt of the money” until Baillie Gifford, an investment company, unveiled a plan to reduce its direct investment in fossil fuels and increase its renewable energy investments.
Flanagan, who is currently hiking through Tasmania, thanked the company for helping fund the £50,000 ($97,261) prize and noted it had an “already minimal” investment in hydrocarbons and saw no future in them.
“Yet, my soul would be troubled if I did not say that the very forests and heathlands, in which I am camped tonight – unique in the world – are existentially threatened by the climate crisis,” he said.
“And were I not to speak of the terrifying impact fossil fuels are having on my island home – that same vanishing world that spurred to write Question 7 – I would be untrue to the spirit of my book.”
The Baillie Gifford Prize judges described Question 7 as “an astonishingly accomplished meditation on memory, history, trauma, love and death – and an intricately woven exploration of the chains of consequence that frame a life.”
Flanagan stressed he was grateful to win the award and beat out five other “exemplary” books on the shortlist, including Pulitzer-Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir.
