First Person

First Person is a novel by the Australian writer Richard Flanagan, published in 2017. Flanagan had won the Man Booker Prize for his earlier novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and this book turns to a smaller and meaner subject: a struggling writer hired to produce another man's life story.

Kif Kehlmann is young, penniless and unpublished when Siegfried Heidl rings him in the middle of the night. Heidl is a corporate criminal about to be tried for defrauding banks of seven hundred million dollars, and he wants a memoir written in six weeks for ten thousand dollars, so Kehlmann takes the job.

The writing gets under way, and Kehlmann begins to fear that he is being corrupted by his subject. As the deadline closes in he becomes less and less certain whether he is ghost-writing a memoir or whether Heidl is rewriting him, his life and his future, and everything that had seemed certain comes apart. The novel asks what a writer will agree to do when the subject is a criminal and the deadline cannot be moved.