In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.

A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.

I do not come out of a literary tradition.

The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.

If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.

My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school.

We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.

Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

I love all forms of music. I even like music I dislike, because the music you dislike is like going to a strange country, and it forces you to rethink everything and to appreciate its particular joys.

I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love.

I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.

You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.

I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.

In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.

Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.

In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.

A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.

History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.

Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.