This year’s Booker prize has gone to 53 year old Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which tells the horror of the captors and prisoners forced into the construction of the Burma Railway during the Second World War. The lauded novel is Flanagan’s sixth.

Despite this year being the first to allow American authors to be eligible for the prize, Flanagan is the third Australian author to have won the lucrative accolade, after fellow antipodeans Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally. Carey, who has won the award twice, had caused controversy on the Sunday prior to the announcement decrying the inclusion of Americans, citing their nationalist restrictions in such landmark prizes as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and stating that the broadened eligibility will cause the Man Booker to lose its “particular cultural flavour”.

Flanagan, whom Carey was supporting to win the prize, has been greeted to general fanfare, a particular Guardian headline describing him as a “solid choice” as winner.

Listen to the Literature team’s podcast discussion of this year’s Booker prize below: