two novels, declared Kirkus Reviews, "rank with the finest fiction out of Australia since the heyday of Patrick White". Gould's Book of Fish (2001), Flanagan's third novel, is based on the life of William Buelow Gould, a convict artist, and tells the tale of his love affair with a young black woman in 1828. It won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Flanagan described these early novels as 'soul histories'. His fourth novel was The Unknown Terrorist (2006), which The New York Times called "stunning ... a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world". His fifth novel, Wanting (2008) tells two parallel stories: about the novelist Charles Dickens in England, and Mathinna, an Aboriginal orphan adopted by Sir John Franklin, the colonial governor of Van Diemen's Land, and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin. As well as being a New Yorker Book of the Year and Observer Book of the Year, it won the Queensland Premier's Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Prize and the Tasmania Book Prize. His sixth novel was The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), called "a masterpiece" by The Guardian. It won the 2014 Man Booker Prize. His seventh novel was First Person, based loosely on his experience early in his writing career ghost-writing the autobiography of John Friedrich. According to the New Yorker "the novel, with its switchbacking recollections and cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, eventually, death, is enigmatic and mesmerizing" while the New York Review of Books called it a "tour-de-force". The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (September, 2020) was Flanagan's eighth novel. In a review for The Sydney Morning Herald Michael Williams called it "a revelation and a triumph . . . astonishing", while Geordie Williamson in The Australian, comparing the novel to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, hailed it as Flanagan's "second great novel" after Gould's Book of Fish. Robert Dixon's (ed.) Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays (2018) offers different perspectives on Flanagan's writing, while Joyce Carol Oates has written an overview of his novels. Journalism Flanagan has written on literature, the environment, art and politics for the Australian and international press including Le Monde, The Daily Telegraph (London), Suddeutsche Zeitung, The Monthly, The New York Times, and the New Yorker. Some of his writings have proved controversial. "The Selling-out of Tasmania", published after the death of former Premier Jim Bacon in 2004, was critical of the Bacon government's relationship with