The Tasmanian novelist – whose latest book, Question 7, is up for both fiction and nonfiction prizes – on HG Wells, the TV adaptation of his Booker prize winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North… and his much-missed parrot, HerbRichard Flanagan, 63, lives in Tasmania, his birthplace. His sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which drew on his father’s experience as a Japanese prisoner of war, won the 2014 Booker prize and is about to become a TV series starring Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi. His latest book, Question 7, is on the shortlist of this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction (to be awarded on 19 November), having also been shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina Étranger, a prize for novels. For the Spectator, it “uses an eccentric toolkit – part memoir, part history, part fictional imagining – to produce a book quite unlike anything else”; for Peter Carey, it “may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years”.How do you feel about Question 7 being up for a fiction prize as well as a nonfiction prize? Delighted. Labels are for jam jars.What led you to write it? A mistaken diagnosis of early onset dementia in 2022. I was given at best 12 months before it would begin in earnest. In those 12 months I wrote the book. When done, I asked my editor if it showed any signs of cognitive collapse; if it did, I didn’t wish to see it published. She began laughing. The neurologist subsequently confirmed