“Whatever the answer is to the great questions, it doesn’t exist within yourself. It exists within others. And your relationship with others.”
We met Australian writer Richard Flanagan behind the scenes of the Literature Festival at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, and had a conversation about the concept of time, the importance of asking questions and understanding the different truths.
Drawing on Indigenous understandings of time, he recalls the Yolngu people’s “fourth tense,” where past, present, and future coexist. In this way of seeing, building fish traps today is inseparable from ancestors who built them thousands of years ago and descendants who will build them thousands of years hence. For Flanagan, this vision of time brings both wonder and responsibility.
“In the high Western idea of time, we are creatures without responsibilities because we only exist for now, as we say. There’s only now. But if there’s more than now, if there’s then and then there’s also tomorrow. Then we have great responsibilities to think differently about the earth and how we treat it. To think differently about others and how we treat them. To think differently about how we are with all living things. Because these things have always been, and they will always continue. So, I found it at once, a revelation, a confirmation, an exhilaration, and I conclude the book describing a traumatic event I had as a young man when I nearly drowned. But what intrigued me is that, in a sense, I’ve always known that, in fact, I’m still there drowning, and that everything that’s happened ever since, including this interview here, now, in Denmark, is just a dream. And at some point, I will return to that place, in the river dark, and it will end. And, it allowed me to finally write something that had been lying uneasily within myself for too long.”
Winner of both the Man Booker Prize (2014) for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Baillie Gifford Prize (2024) for Question 7, Flanagan is the only writer ever to have received both Britain’s most prestigious awards for fiction and non-fiction. His novels — from Death of a River Guide and Gould’s Book of Fish to The Living Sea of Waking Dreams — are celebrated for their lyrical depth, moral urgency, and rootedness in the Tasmanian landscape. Often described as “one of the greatest living novelists,” his work has been translated into over forty languages and has won acclaim across Europe, the United States, and Australia.
Richard Flanagan was interviewed by Gyrith Ravn in Denmark in August 2025.
Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard
Edited by: Sarah Kazes Pedersen
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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