Bio

Patrick Flanery's first novel, Absolution, was published in 2012; it won the Spear's/Laurent Perrier Best First 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 longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Desmond Elliott Prize. His second novel, Fallen Land, was published in 2013. His third novel, I Am No One, was published in 2016. His fourth novel, Night for Day, as well as a hybrid creative-critical book, The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption, were both published in 2019. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. In 2020 he directed and wrote a short documentary film, Sensitive Surfaces, about South African artist Kate Gottgens.

Flanery's work has appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, Granta, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Daily Telegraph. He has held residential fellowships at MacDowell in New Hampshire, the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside of Florence, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa.

He has taught at Queen Mary University of London and at the University of Reading in the UK. He is Professor Extraordinary at the University of Stellenbosch and since January 2021 has been Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide in Australia.