Australian author John Flanagan, best known for his internationally bestselling fantasy adventure series The Ranger’s Apprentice, died February 7 of complications from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He was 81.
John Flanagan was born May 22, 1944 in Sydney, Australia. While growing up, he exhibited great interest in both music and writing—passions that would fuel his career and life. “For as long as I can remember I always wanted to be a writer,” he told an audience of students at Waverly College, his Catholic boys’ school alma mater in Sydney, at an event covered by Catholic Weekly in 2018.
By the time Flanagan graduated college, he had already started a folk band, called The New York Public Library, and established himself as a songwriter, singer, and musician (playing guitar, mandolin, and banjo). But he still wanted to pursue his writing aspirations. He landed a position at advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, where he worked as a copywriter, and where he also met his wife, Leonie, whom he married in 1967, according to a tribute from his literary agency, InkWell Managment. The couple went on to have three children.
In the mid 1970s, Flanagan left corporate advertising and became a freelance writer so that he could spend more time with his family. That’s when he shifted gears and began writing for television, including co-creating the long-running Australian sitcom Hey Dad..! “In all that time, I was writing books in my spare time,” he told PW in 2008. “It was something I always wanted to do—literally, my dream was always to earn my living as an author. Which is why I’m always walking around with a smile on my face now.”
Flanagan considered his advertising and TV work ideal preparation for his eventual career as a novelist. His earliest manuscripts, one written at age 19, were thrillers. But later, part of his writing for fun involved entertaining his then-adolescent son, Michael, a reluctant reader. Flanagan crafted a series of stories starring Will, a 15-year-old orphan too small to be a knight, who is recruited by the prestigious Rangers corps who protect the kingdom. “I based the lead character strongly on Mike, and used all of his interests,” Flanagan told PW. “The principal two were archery and knife-throwing. And I gave Will all of his physical qualities.” Michael became so hooked on the weekly stories that he was soon asking his dad for the next installment.
Flanagan then set those stories aside in a drawer and it wasn’t until more than a decade later, when he was looking for a project to work on, that his eldest daughter suggested he dust them off. In the late ’90s, Will became the protagonist of the Ranger’s Apprentice series, which launched in the U.S. in 2005 with The Ruins of Gorlan (Philomel). When Philomel’s then-president and publisher Michael Green read the opening chapter of Flanagan’s first draft of the book, “It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” Green told PW in 2011. “I knew in my gut that I was reading something special. John has a unique ability to create both world and characters that feel real, yet touch the edge of the fantastic, to the point that everything is completely believable and nothing is so far-fetched that it feels like pure fantasy.”
The core Ranger’s Apprentice series grew to 10 volumes, with the universe gradually expanding to include the parallel seafaring Brotherband series, spinoff series The Royal Ranger, two Early Years prequels, and Ranger’s Apprentice: The Lost Stories. A Ranger’s Apprentice feature film, adapting the first two books, is currently in pre-production at Skydance Media. Flanagan also wrote two titles in his Jesse Parker Mystery series for adults, and the nautical history novel, The Grey Raider (Random House Australia, 2015).
“John is quite simply a terrific writer,” Green said in his 2011 interview. “I often say that [The Ranger’s Apprentice] is a series that began as an effort to get one boy to read, and has made readers of millions of boys across the world.”
