AC Grayling defends Booker-winner Richard Flanagan after hatchet job

The Booker judge responds with his own stinging attack on Michael Hofmann, after the latter’s ‘silly’ review of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The chair of last year’s Man Booker prize judges, AC Grayling, has charged to the defence of the winner, Richard Flanagan, after the Australian’s novel got a scathing write-up in the London Review of Books.

In a letter published in the new issue of the literary magazine, the philosopher takes issue with the poet and critic Michael Hofmann’s lengthy take-down of Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which ends by suggesting that the novel should have been consigned to the flames of a barbecue.

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