When he was 21, award-winning Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan was trapped for three hours between shrieking white water and a granite rock that was slowly crushing his legs.
'I was working as a river guide and the front of the kayak got stuck under a rock in the rapid, and then it broke in half with me in it and the water going over my head. I was stuck in a tiny air pocket and I couldn't get out.' He was eventually saved by some other guides: 'They were dangling on ropes - they tried everything, even tried to crush my legs to get me out, while I was going slowly to sleep, drowning.' As well as the icy cold and the pain - he was in a wheelchair for months afterwards - Flanagan, now 34, felt a sense of clarity that has never left him, and which has shaped both his life and his work, including his first novel Death of a River Guide.
It won the 1995 Victorian Premier's Award for first fiction, and the 1996 Adelaide Festival Award for fiction.
'The reality was a bit different to the book. In the book the river guide comes to a deep understanding about his world at the moment that he is drowning. While what really happened to me is that I didn't see my life flashing before my eyes or anything, it changed how I saw the world ever after: it sort of unravelled over a long time.' Even now, he says, 'I can't even go out and sit on the grass without thinking about what an extraordinary and beautiful thing it is. You listen to the earth more. And careers and jobs aren't so important, it's your family and friends that matter.' Flanagan is not, however, the kind of writer who feels he has a special mission on earth to write, to expound. Indeed, he emphasises again and again, how 'ordinary' he is.
'I'm married, I've got three daughters, I live a very ordinary humdrum family life and I love it.' He likes going to pubs and talking with friends and playing with his children. 'Ordinary things: nothing else really matters.' He grew up in Tasmania: an island that has not been fabled for nurturing writing talent. Yet his family history - which he describes as 'a convict sort of background which didn't change much for a century and a half; mine was the first generation to go to university' - was where he derived his deep love of the written word.
He explained it best in an extraordinary acceptance speech for the Adelaide prize for the best Australian novel since 1994. Instead of beginning with the standard list of thanks to his publisher, his family, his muse, his computer, he began with a story. It went like this: 'There once was a man who was a railway ganger. He was illiterate, but each night he liked to hold in his saveloy-like fingers the Sporting Globe . . . He was our grandfather, Patrick Flanagan.
'His son, our dad, known as Archie, did learn to read and write and as a child filled out my grandfather's worksheets by the sliding light of a kerosene lamp.