Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright and author of non-fiction. He is best known for writing Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982, which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. The book would later be adapted to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.Often published under the name Tom Keneally in Australia.Life and Career:Born in Sydney, Keneally was educated at St Patrick's College, Strathfield, where a writing prize was named after him. He entered St Patrick's Seminary, Manly to train as a Catholic priest but left before his ordination. He worked as a Sydney schoolteacher before his success as a novelist, and he was a lecturer at the University of New England (1968–70). He has also written screenplays, memoirs and non-fiction books.Keneally was known as "Mick" until 1964 but began using the name Thomas when he started publishing, after advice from his publisher to use what was really his first name. He is most famous for his Schindler's Ark (1982) (later republished as Schindler's List), which won the Booker Prize and is the basis of the film Schindler's List (1993). Many of his novels are reworkings of historical material, although modern in their psychology and style.Keneally has also acted in a handful of films. He had a small role in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (based on his novel) and played Father Marshall in the Fred Schepisi movie, The Devil's Playground (1976) (not to be confused with a similarly-titled documentary by Lucy Walker about the Amish rite of passage called rumspringa).In 1983, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). He is an Australian Living Treasure.He is a strong advocate of the Australian republic, meaning the severing of all ties with the British monarchy, and published a book on the subject in Our Republic (1993). Several of his Republican essays appear on the web site of the Australian Republican Movement.Keneally is a keen supporter of rugby league football, in particular the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles club of the NRL. He made an appearance in the rugby league drama film The Final Winter (2007).In March 2009, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, gave an autographed copy of Keneally's Lincoln biography to President Barack Obama as a state gift.Most recently Thomas Keneally featured as a writer in the critically acclaimed Australian drama, Our Sunburnt Country.Thomas Keneally's nephew Ben is married to the former NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally.
Is an avid fan of the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles rugby league team in Sydneys Northern Beaches.
Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 130, pp. 230-237. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.
He was awarded the A.O. (Officer of the Order of Australia) in the 1983 Queens Birthday Honours List for his services to Literature.
Can be seen attending home games of the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles at Brookval Oval
(January 2009) Bilgola Beach, New South Wales, Australia
Oskar Schindlers story went relatively unknown for several decades before Keneally wrote it. It was only after emigrating to America that Leopold Pfefferberg (one of the Schindlerjuden) began talking to any author he could find about publishing the story. All were unreceptive. Thomas Keneally only happened to meet Pfefferberg by chance, and upon learning that he was a Holocaust survivor, immediately agreed to write their story.
He was the winner of the 1982 Booker Prize for "Schindlers Ark.".
The taste one gets of death in dreams I find more penetrating and atmospheric than the ordinary fear one might suffer while awake.
Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.
But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative.
Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.
High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work.
The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.
Oskar showed that virtue emerged where it would, and the sort of churchy observance bishops called for was not a guarantee of genuine humanity in a person. .
