Good writing is never orthodoxy. It is heresy.
Richard Flanagan’s collection of occasional pieces is aptly named HERESIES and each and every piece is never anything less than good writing.
At its core, the pieces are about free speech, the importance of writing, of discussion and debate, and the concern about the erosion of democracy in the contemporary world.
History’s response to heretics has been consistent – to silence, shame and ultimately, to burn them.
Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan has spent his career speaking in ways that make the powerful uncomfortable. In his new book, HERESIES, he argues that if a writer is doing their job they inevitably end up saying the unsayable. But Australia in 2026 risks becoming the country of the unsaid as the prohibitions on speaking freely grow from both the left and the right – legal, formal and informal – too often with the aim of entrenching injustice and inequality.
A guest of this year’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Flanagan’s writing is incendiary, insightful, invigorating and inquisitive. An enema of the populist, anathema to think tanks, his aim is true when targeting the truth trash merchants.
A couple of dozen coruscating commentaries comprise this compendium assault on the reason-free zone, taking stands against the status quo, the erosion of the environment, both the natural world and the political ecosystem that has devolved into an empty echo chamber.
Flanagan comments on the recent auto de fe of the Adelaide Writer’s Festival, questions the Segal Report, and cautions the fresh favour and digital expression of AI and social media found by contemporary persecutors.
He abhors the notion of a national literature, illustrates an intelligent iconoclasm towards national symbols, and invokes Archie Roach’s dream of all of us being the authors of a new story for Australia.
In the title piece, Flanagan writes “perhaps for any of us to write of hope, to write of love, we must learn once more to be free, and to embrace heresy. And for that to happen we must every day write ourselves out of the literature of silence.”
HERESIES by Richard Flanagan is Published by Penguin.
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas runs in Sydney August 20 -30
