Patrick Flanery

Patrick Denman Flanery (born 1975) is an American author and academic. he is a chair of creative writing at the University of Adelaide in Adelaide, South Australia. He is known for his 2012 novel, Absolution.

Early life and education Patrick Denman Flanery was born in 1975 in California, the son of politically liberal parents,

In 2001, he moved to the U.K. At Oxford University, he earned a doctorate with a thesis about the publishing and adaptation histories of the novels of Evelyn Waugh, at the same time researching South African literature and film.

He taught at the University of Reading, and was professor of creative writing at the Queen Mary University of London from before 2012 until around 2020.

he is chair of creative writing at the University of Adelaide, having joined the faculty in January 2021. He is also, concurrently, Professor Extraordinary in the English Department at the University of Stellenbosch. Flanery said that "What I was trying to do in Absolution was suggest there was moral ambiguity on both sides, or at least that ordinary people had to make impossible choices". and was shortlisted for several other awards. A review in The Financial Times declared "Absolution serves as proof, if any were needed, that a novel can be both unashamedly literary and compellingly readable".

Taking up themes of the housing boom and bust, reparations for land stolen from black farmers, and creeping surveillance, Fallen Land was very much in tune with the Zeitgeist when it came out in 2013. James Bradley of The Washington Post noted that "it paints a chilling picture of a society deranged by violence, paranoia and its own fantasies of self-reliance". The story is told from the perspective of an elderly African American woman who is forced into selling her family farm.

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. It is written in the first person, which A.S. Byatt called "a big risk".

Night for Day was published in 2019. Set in Los Angeles in 1950, it follows two friends over the course of a day, during the McCarthy Communist witch hunts.

Other writing A memoir, which Flanery described as "a hybrid creative-critical memoir", entitled The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption, was published in 2019.

His non-fiction essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph,

In 2020 he wrote and directed a short documentary film, Sensitive Surfaces, about South African artist Kate Gottgens.

Recognition and accolades Flanery has had two writing fellowships in Italy: at the Bellagio Center (owned by the Rockefeller Foundation) in 2013, in the village of Donnini, near Florence, in 2013 and 2015.

He was also given a residency at MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 2019, in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

A. S. Byatt, in a review of I Am No One in The Guardian, wrote

Awards 2012: Absolution, Winner, Spear's Best First Book Award, for Absolution 2012: Absolution Shortlisted, Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize 2012: Absolution Shortlisted, Authors' Club First Novel Award

Personal life Flanery's partner is an academic who was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, so Flanery "spent a lot of time in South Africa with extended family and friends, and living in domestic spaces".

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