Australia\\\'s Flanagan wins Booker fiction prize

Australian writer Richard Flanagan has won this year's Man Booker Prize for his visceral book about wartime brutality and its aftermath – a novel the head of the judging team said was as powerful as a kick in the stomach. Flanagan drew on his father’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of the Japanese for ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North,’ which centres on the Burma Death Railway, built with forced labour at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Named after a classic work of Japanese literature, the book is dedicated to Flanagan’s father – referred to by his prisoner number, 335 – who died at the age of 98 shortly after his son finished the manuscript. Flanagan is the third Australian to take the award, after Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey. The prize was handed over to Flanagan on Tuesday, according to a news agency.