Here's Your 2014 Man Booker Prize Winner

Booksellers, clear some space on your front tables: The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about to sell in droves. That's because on Tuesday, Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Can you hear Australia cheering?

Flanagan takes home the £50,000 literary award, beating out the rest of the 2014 Man Booker Prize shortlist, which included American authors Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler, and British authors Howard Jacobson, Neel Mukherjee, and Ali Smith. Flanagan is the third Australian to win the prize. Obviously, Flanagan's honor is a big deal on its own — but if you've been following the story of the Man Booker Prize this year, you know that people were watching this ceremony extra-hard, since this was the first time the prize was open to novels written in English outside Britain, the Commonwealth, Ireland, and Zimbabwe.

Flanagan's novel, which came out in July of 2014, is set in August of 1943 in a Japanese POW camp. Flanagan worked on Narrow Road for 12 years ...so it's pretty cool to see him snag this honor. This is the writer's sixth novel, and the praise has been out-of-this-world.... Apparently, deservedly so.

Here's what people have been saying about Flanagan on Twitter:

Image: Ulf Andersen