My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.
My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.
I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
I love all forms of music. I even like music I dislike, because the music you dislike is like going to a strange country, and it forces you to rethink everything and to appreciate its particular joys.
Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.
Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.
For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'
I do not come out of a literary tradition.
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.
