Patrick Flanery

Background

Patrick Flanery was born in 1974 in Omaha, Nebraska.

Education

Patrick studied at New York University, where he majored in film production. He also studied 20th-century English Literature, and wrote his doctoral thesis on the publishing and adaptation history of Evelyn Waugh, at the University of Oxford.

Career

Patrick Flanery's debut novel, Absolution, weaves a story of South Africa's violent past and troubled present, built around a series of conversations between an aging novelist and her official biographer. It was originally published in 2012 by Atlantic Books in the UK and Riverhead in the USA and has since been translated into eleven languages.

His second novel, Fallen Land, was published in 2013. Taking up themes of the housing boom and bust, reparations for land stolen from black farmers, and creeping surveillance, it was very much in tune with the Zeitgeist.

Flanery's third novel, I Am No One, was released in 2016. This book is about a university professor who returns to New York after teaching at Oxford. Various disconcerting events convince him he is under surveillance and his privacy is being invaded by unknown people.

Patrick is currently a professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London and formerly taught at the University of Reading. His non-fiction essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph. He has also written several articles in academic journals.

Achievements

• Patrick Flanery is a prolific writer. His best-known work is Absolution, which won the Spear's Book Award and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Author's Club Best First Novel Award, and the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. It was also longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Desmond Elliott Prize.

Works

More photos

• book

  • I Am No One

    (A tense, mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, a...)

    2016
  • Absolution

    (A bold and exciting literary novel that contemplates the ...)

    2012
  • The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption

    (A raw and heart-wrenching literary memoir about a queer c...)

    2019
  • Night for Day

    (Los Angeles, 1950. Over the course of a single day, two f...)

    2019

• ищщл

  • Fallen Land

    (From the critically acclaimed author of Absolution, a lit...)

    2013

Views

Quotations: "Thinking about the books I love, they all start in radically different ways, although I suppose what they have in common is one of two things: either a compelling mastery of language and captivating style, or strong dramatic action that makes one want to know more. The greatest books, for me, combine both these qualities."

Connections

Patrick now lives in London with his South Africal partner.