‘It is not the job of writing to be ethical; its job is to be true’

At the Jaipur Literature Festival, Richard Flanagan, the only writer in the world to have won both the Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, talks about what stories mean to us

- Saurabh Sharma

n Question 7 (2023), you note that the “bath before [Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard comes up with the idea of a nuclear chain reaction] is pure fancy on my part.” Ina work of nonfiction, this liberty is reminiscent of Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut’s statement that anything that comes out of a writer is fiction.

I don’t mean it in a rude way but that’s the wrong way of framing it. For me, stories are ways of discovering and revealing the truth, away of parting the mist and seeing what's actually there. I think fiction succeeds in asking the right questions whereas it fails when it thinks it has the answers. Politics and religions propose answers. And they also lead us into periods of great distress and suffering.

I wrote this book out of the novelistic part of me. I've worked in journalism and history, and that demands a different aspect of you. Doing your job [as an interviewer] requires you to proceed outwards. You report on what you feel, hear and see, to the extent you offer a commentary, making it clear it’s an opinion separate from what you felt, heard, and saw. But for this book, I wanted to go into my soul and try to ask the right questions about certain things...

There are many reasons why I wrote the book, but one of them is that there's this tendency in the world today to think that only numbers tell the truth. I feel it’s stories that go into the heart of “who” and “what” we are, if we choose to listen to them, and to think about them and what they mean to us.