‘I did not wish to die. I was 21 … But death was

The Booker prize winner was a young man kayaking a remote Tasmanian river when he became stuck at the bottom of a rapid, boulders trapping him under the water. As he became weaker, he felt himself facing his final moments …

At first I thought I would escape easily. But then the river flooded into the kayak, filling it in seconds with the force of tons of rushing water, the kayak began sagging and the fibreglass behind my seat cracked. The boat folded. The front half sank to the riverbed dragging me down with it, and I felt myself disappearing beneath the rapid. Behind my back the broken stern splayed upwards towards the air, braced by the drop’s ledge, jamming the kayak in the rapid. The rounded front deck flattened onto my legs from the river’s force, trapping my knees. The overwhelming power of the water against my back pushed me up off the kayak seat so that I wasn’t sitting but hovering above it, fixed in place by my jammed, crushed legs.

The river was now rolling over me. A black plume above my head transformed into a cascading flume of aerated white water beyond it with a small air pocket forming in front of my face, all that would keep me alive for several hours.