LONDON (AP) — Australian writer Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize on Tuesday with a visceral book about wartime brutality and its aftermath — a novel the head of the judging team said was as powerful as a kick in the stomach.

Flanagan drew on his father’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of the Japanese for “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” which centers on the Burma Death Railway, built with forced labor at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.