Thomas Keneally
Thomas Keneally was born in Sydney in 1935, the city to which he returned after spending his early childhood in country NSW towns. An asthmatic as a child, the sports-mad Keneally was kept from the field. This had the benefit of exposing him to the world of the book and planting the seed of his passion for the written word. Before emerging as one of Australia's key writers, Keneally studied for the priesthood for six years. He left the seminary before ordination, becoming a schoolteacher in 1960. It wasn't until the publication of his third novel, Bring Larks and Heroes, which delivered him the 1967 Miles Franklin Award, that Keneally considered writing fulltime as career.
A prolific writer who has had published more than 40 works of fiction and non-fiction for print, stage and screen, Keneally is perhaps best known for his historical novel Schindler's Ark. He was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize for the novel in 1982, which 10 years later was made into the Oscar-winning Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg. Keneally was initially a controversial winner, with debate raging over whether Schindler's Ark was fiction or non-fiction. Keneally has been short-listed for the Booker for three other novels, the Australian classic The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), Gossip from the Forest (1975) and Confederates (1979). His Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete won him the Miles Franklin Award in 1967 and 1968 respectively, and in 2008 his The Widow and Her Hero was short-listed for the Prime Minister's Literary Award. His most recent novel is The People's Train (2009).
It reminds you of all the teachers who said 'you'll never go anywhere, son'.
While Keneally is renowned for his fiction, he is also an author of non-fiction, and has an abiding interest in history, both Australian history and that of other nations. Most recently he has published the first volume of his history of Australia, Australians: Origins to Eureka, launched in August 2009. He is the founding chair of the Australian Republican Movement, drafting a much remarked upon preamble to the Australian constitution in 1999, for possible use had the Republican Movement been successful. His histories also include The Commonwealth of Thieves and The Great Shame, and, more personally, the memoir Homebush Boy in 1995.
In 1983 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to Australian literature, and was given an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Queensland. In 1997 he was named a Living Treasure by the National Trust. He is a Fellow the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds a number of honorary doctorates in Australia and the United States, and one in Ireland. Prime Minister Rudd presented Barack Obama with a signed copy of Keneally's 2003 biography of Abraham Lincoln when he visited the US in 2008.
