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A prime corner window seat has been reserved. The surrounding tables stand empty and the staff are prepped, with extra pairs of hands put on to ensure the dishes arrive just so. There is a whiff of excitement about Richard Flanagan\u2019s impending visit. The words \u201cnational treasure\u201d have even been thrown around.<\/p>\n
When the Tasmanian writer chooses Bills in Surry Hills for our brunch during a trip to Sydney, naturally, I assume it\u2019s for the ricotta hotcakes. Those great pillowy things oozing with banana and honeycomb butter, they\u2019re the famous dish that helped the late Bill Granger<\/a> export the Australian idea of brunch to the world. Oprah, no less, came back for them two days running when she was in Australia last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n Praise be the small, intimate insights this interview format affords! A sweet tooth for this great man of Australian letters. The Booker Prize-winning author<\/a> of The Narrow Road to the Deep North must look forward to these $33 pancakes whenever he comes to Sydney. Perhaps they are a consolation for leaving his writing shack on the remote island of Bruny. A modest pleasure tucked into the routines of a serious literary life.<\/p>\n But Flanagan passes over the corn fritters with roast tomato and avocado salsa, the hot smoked trout with shiso and saltbush furikake, the perilla oil labneh and caraway pickled beetroot \u2013 all the whipped this and fermented that. Each dish, he observes, is a \u201csort of thesis\u201d.<\/p>\n The pancake theory collapses almost immediately. Somewhat hesitatingly, Flanagan confesses: his usual here is toast and marmalade.<\/p>\n \u201cI always think I should have the pancakes,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve never had them. I usually just have toast and marmalade, would you believe? You\u2019ve got all these readers, they\u2019ll go, \u2018he had toast and marmalade?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n He generally doesn\u2019t even eat until midday. \u201cOnce you eat, you lose your energy. A lot of writers will not eat in the morning much and then have a small lunch. Once you eat a lot, your energy drops, particularly now I\u2019m aged.\u201d<\/p>\n So why Bills? When Flanagan comes to Sydney he stays at a hotel nearby, a favourite because, unusually, the windows open. He wanders into Bills for a long black, and the staff are always lovely to him. Which leaves Flanagan feeling somewhat guilty for not giving the full splendour of Bills a chance to be put on show. I match the Paddington Bear vibe and opt for the toast with strawberry jam; one must not, after all, break bread alone.<\/p>\n We do, however, get considerable mileage out of watching our multiple Walkley Award-winning photographer Steven Siewert attempt to artfully capture a plate of toast, while kind staff offer to bring out supporting dishes so the spread looks a little less like prison rations.<\/p>\n He has, we agree, committed a Bills brunch heresy \u2013 narratively convenient given Heresies is the name of his new collection of essays<\/a>. Can you be a national treasure \u2013 as he was, at least once, called at Bills \u2013 and a heretic at the same time?<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a history of burning national treasures, isn\u2019t there?\u201d he says, glint in those blue eyes. You become one a century later, \u201cnormally after the stake and the pyre\u201d. He\u2019s never heard himself called one before. His canonisers at Bills, he jokes, must have been relying on good photos.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not all sourdough; there is some sweet. Quince bellinis \u2013 poached quince and prosecco \u2013 are ordered with the relish of a \u201cf–k it, let\u2019s go, let\u2019s have a drink\u201d.<\/p>\n Breakfast bellinis in hand, Flanagan is a great conversationalist, possessed of the sort of Rhodes Scholar, Oxford-educated learnedness that makes you regret the intellectual energy you\u2019ve devoted to the latest book world drama over whether Rachel Cusk\u2019s new novel is really about Natalie Portman. We roam from his experiments with AI (\u201csliced white bread for the mind\u201d) to the book currently in his suitcase, Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re on Philip K. Dick, and Ma\u00efa Hruska\u2019s Kafkaesque, which he recommends I read. It\u2019s never one-sided; he asks as many questions as he answers. There are Albert Camus\u2019 notebooks, Tolstoy\u2019s celibacy pamphlet, Eric Vuillard on Hitler and Yuri Herrera and Latin American fiction. There\u2019s a now very senior Australian politician ripping him on the phone after an essay he published, at least 30 minutes of top-notch literary gossip which he tactfully declares \u201coff the record\u201d, and the history of Oomite (another possible spread option for our toast).<\/p>\n Editor’s pick The last time I interviewed Flanagan was for Question 7<\/a>, his 2023 book that went on to win the Baillie Gifford Prize, although he declined the $100,000 prize money<\/a> because of the sponsor\u2019s investments in fossil fuels. It was a remarkable work of non-fiction \u2013 somewhat reductively called a memoir \u2013 about how one event opens onto another until, somehow, remarkably, a life takes shape. It flowed between his father\u2019s survival as a prisoner of war, the atomic bomb, his childhood in Tasmania and his own near-drowning on the Franklin River, showing how events separated by decades and continents came to bear on his own existence. There was a sense of finality to the book, as though Flanagan was weaving together all the threads of his life\u2019s preoccupations into a monumental tapestry that would hang on the walls if he was no longer there.<\/p>\n At the time, Flanagan said it was his most important book and after completing it the urge to write had, for the first time, disappeared. In its place was what he described as a \u201cgreat silence\u201d, something he had never experienced before, which left him unsure whether he would ever write another book.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cOnce upon a time with interviews I\u2019d try and say what I thought I should, what I was expected to say. And then I realised that was dishonest without meaning to be, so I said the truth, which was I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ll write again, which is what it was,\u201d he says now.<\/p>\n But what he didn\u2019t fully explain to me then was why. Now he does.<\/p>\n Flanagan had been given what he calls a \u201ctragicomic diagnosis\u201d of early-onset dementia and told he had 12 months to get his affairs in order. Question 7 was the book he felt he had to write in the time he believed he had left, and he wrote it thinking it would be his last.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel anger, no, I felt fear,\u201d Flanagan explains. \u201cI mean, you have your run around the oval and yeah, that\u2019s that, isn\u2019t it? I\u2019ve had close friends die. I guess I felt a certain fear. But above all I felt … I mean, you don\u2019t feel one thing, you feel many things and the many things became that book that was Question 7. I just wanted to sing that world into being, that was really it. And the goodness of it, you know?<\/p>\n \u201cI mean we all come from unique worlds but we always assume that we come from the same world. I don\u2019t know the world you\u2019re from, but it would be unique and extraordinary, and so in that book I wanted to explain the world I came from which I thought was really special.\u201d<\/p>\n I mean, you have your run around the oval and yeah, that\u2019s that, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n Once the manuscript was finished, Flanagan sent it to his publisher of nearly 30 years, Nikki Christer at Penguin Random House, with a question: did it show signs of cognitive collapse? Her response, after reading it, was laughter. He felt oddly reassured.<\/p>\n He lived with the diagnosis for a year before returning for fresh MRIs where he discovered that \u201cthe radiologist\u2019s initial report had got it wrong. So I didn\u2019t have it. It was a misdiagnosis\u201d.<\/p>\n Flanagan says he doesn\u2019t like \u201cthe personal coming into things\u201d, which was partly why he was reluctant to discuss the experience at the time. Some of that reluctance remains. When I wonder what it must have been like to live for a year with that knowledge, he seems almost intent on keeping the theatrics of it at bay. \u201cIt\u2019s a small thing because nothing happened, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n A sense of serenity and deep gratitude, he says, followed the all-clear. Plus, an appreciation for what the experience revealed. \u201cAnd really that\u2019s the point of the book, like it\u2019s how beautiful it is to be alive and to know these things and to hold these memories,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd so once I was given the all-clear, I was just so happy to be with my friends, to be out in a day like today. To see birds, feel the wind on my face, to be with my family. That was all so exquisitely sweet for me.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t share the despair of the age. For all its problems, it\u2019s a beautiful world, and it\u2019s still full of hope. There\u2019s goodness and kindness everywhere you look. We have our phones, we\u2019re filled with the worst of us and it\u2019s all true. But it was true in 1914. It was true in 1939. But there is the other truth of our own worlds and we should honour that more.\u201d<\/p>\n There is something of that argument in Heresies, Flanagan\u2019s new collection of essays and speeches written across two decades. The subjects roam from Manus Island and climate change to literature and writers\u2019 festivals, but running through them is a concern about the pressure to conform: through law, institutional caution, online outrage and, perhaps most dangerously, the fact that \u201cthe new censors are not the state or state bodies. They are us\u201d. For Flanagan, the writer has a particular responsibility in the face of that pressure \u2013 to commit heresy. Heresy, he says, \u201callows a writer to write freely, allows writing to be an act of joy that arises from the same deep place where laughter lives, countering the farce of dogma with the reality of life\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe older I\u2019ve got, the more I\u2019ve been struck by how conformist we are,\u201d Flanagan says. \u201cHow in other cultures it\u2019s not just accepted but expected that artists would think differently … I can\u2019t think of a country where artists are held in such low repute.<\/p>\n \u201cArt always rubs against the grain and art says the unsayable and so in consequence, if you\u2019re doing your job properly, inevitably you do come to be seen to be propounding heresies.\u201d<\/p>\n Twenty years of essays also capture how the inquisitions change. In one, Flanagan criticises the Brisbane Writers Festival for its response to Lionel Shriver\u2019s speech on cultural appropriation, during which she wore a sombrero<\/a>, defending her right to make the argument even as the backlash grew.<\/p>\n A decade later, his piece on the collapse of this year\u2019s Adelaide Writers\u2019 Week<\/a> shows some reason to hope. After Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah was removed from the program, hundreds of writers withdrew and the event was cancelled.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a line about free speech that politicians were willing to just trample over for political expediency,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd writers who almost all have nothing but for whom that\u2019s an important thing, they held a line and it was a really important line for us as a nation. I think it really signalled something very powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n The same battle is now playing out in many cultural institutions. He sees the University of Queensland Press\u2019s recent pulping<\/a> of a children\u2019s book over an online essay about the Bondi Beach shooting written by its illustrator as an example of what happens when institutions become bound by political definitions, and an artist\u2019s personal views become inseparable from their work. The university referred to \u201cits adopted definition of antisemitism\u201d in explaining the decision.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it points to the monstrosity of adopting the IHRA [The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of antisemitism,\u201d Flanagan says. \u201cI\u2019ve read the essay, if you can call it that. It is stupid and offensive, but it has nothing to do with the illustrations he did for that book It\u2019s a tragedy for UQP, which has been such an important force in Australian literature.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Richard](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/2393add924837aedc7f20fa9f7bc3f470496e404.jpeg\")
Richard Flanagan usually skips breakfast, preferring to eat later in the day. Steven Siewert<\/p>\n![\"Iggy\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/7af54062fe9042ade664bd0780301632cade9701.jpeg\")
Iggy\u2019s flavourful sourdough toast with marmalade and butter (and an optional dish of Oomite). Steven Siewert<\/p>\n![\"Richard](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/7951f26a29a57bb67506cda2cc064eaf7b8e58fb.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Richard](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/27e653efd9aaacb21ff7f3b2f3739196c4ba3e31.jpeg\")
Richard Flanagan after winning the Booker Prize in 2014.AFP<\/p>\n![\"Toast](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/efc643f3b00bea3a50d271f662cf7560904d9efa.jpeg\")
Toast and Bellinis, the breakfast of champions.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/48d0063fb411c35e4e4f098b0abd9ef147ad72f6.jpeg\")
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