LONDON: Novelist Richard Flanagan said he was ashamed to be Australian after winning the Man Booker Prize for his book “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” inspired by his father’s experience as a prisoner of war.

The book tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a surgeon imprisoned in a Japanese work camp on the Thailand-Burma railway.

“The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war,” said academic AC Grayling, who presented the award at a glitzy ceremony in London’s Guildhall on Tuesday evening.

“This is the book that Richard Flanagan was born to write.”

Flanagan is the third Australian to win the prize, which includes a trophy and an award of £50,000 ($80,000, 63,000 euros).

In an interview with the BBC after receiving the accolade, the 53-year-old used the occasion to hit out at his home nation’s environmental policies, just days after Prime Minister Tony Abbott said “coal is good for humanity.”

“Australia has the most extraordinary environment and I don’t understand why our government seems committed to destroying what we have that’s unique in the world,” said Flanagan, a long-time campaigner for the preservation of old growth forest in his home state of Tasmania.

“To be frank, I’m ashamed to be Australian when you bring this up.”

Abbott made the comment while opening a new mine in Queensland state, trumpeting coal as “an essential part of economic future.”

The author of “The Sound of One Hand Clapping” (1998) and “Wanting” (2008), Flanagan said the idea of the so-called “Death Railway” had influenced his life.

“As a child, my father taught me the Japanese words ‘san byaku san ju go’. It was his number, 335, that he answered to as a slave laborer of the Japanese on the Death Railway,” Flanagan said.

“It was, I guess, a strange mystery. Occasionally I glimpsed what that enigma might be in laughter, a grimace, a hand momentarily tensing on my shoulder, or the recited lines of others. After many years, I discovered it was also me.

“And so I am a child of the Death Railway. I am a writer. And sometimes it falls to a writer to seek to communicate the incommunicable.”

Flanagan worked on the novel for 12 years, and his father died the day that it was finished.