Set in his native Tasmania, Richard Flanagan’s novels have helped to transform perceptions of the former penal colony. Death of a River Guide (1997) is about the island’s Franklin River, while Gould’s Book of Fish, which won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize, is based on the life of convict Billy Gould, who became an artist after his deportation to Australia. Flanagan, himself descended from Irish convicts, was born in 1961. He studied in Tasmania, and at Oxford University, before returning home to work as a bush labourer, a river guide and, latterly, a novelist. He has also written three non-fiction books about his homeland. He is married with three children and lives in Hobart.

What books are on your bedside table?

James Boswell’s London Journal and a book of poems by Jorge Luís Borges.

What book changed your life?

Camus’s The Outsider, when I was 12. I had been reading comics and penny westerns. It looked thin and there was nothing else around. I understood almost none of it except the heat and the light and how truth gets you into trouble.

What is the strangest thing you’ve done when researching a book?

Attempting an upside-down, double-thigh pole clutch and failing; it was for The Unknown Terrorist, which has a pole dancer as its main character.

What music helps you write?

Once upon a time, any. Now, I tend to prefer the noise of life.

Which literary character most resembles you?

Lassie. I think it’s the mane.

Who would you like to sit next to at a dinner party?

Someone who isn’t a bore, which rules out many of the famous people I’ve met.

What keeps you awake at night?

Bad habits.

When do you feel most free?

Laughing.

When did you last cry?

When I thought my mother was dying.

What would you go back and change?

I nearly drowned when I was 20. Thereafter I lost the capacity for regret.

What book do you wish you’d written?

None. Who would want the additional agony? I get to read them, which is more delightful.

What are you most proud of writing?

My first novel, Death of a River Guide, because writing it was so hard and seemingly so doomed, and the publication of it freed me. It was the book I had to write if I was to write any others.

Richard Flanagan’s fifth novel is ‘Wanting’ (Atlantic)