Thomas Keneally

The movie premiered in Washington in December 1993 in the presence of President Clinton and the First Lady.

The character of Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist and Nazi who saved more than 1200 Jews during the Holocaust by sheltering them in his armaments factory, attracted Keneally precisely because he was the antithesis of our traditional view of the one-dimensional altruistic character. Schindler was a charmer, a black marketer, a bon vivant, and a womanizer.

Schindler was someone who needed war to thrive, and made millions from his activities on the Polish black market and through his dealings with the German Army. Yet he spent millions bribing Rich Officials to keep the Jews under his care safe from the Nazi's murderous extermination camps.

This novel was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction, Britain's most prestigious book prize, in 1982, and the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction in 1983,

While Schindler List is probably Keneally's best-known work of fiction, to look at this as his defining moment as an author is to just begin to scratch the surface of a long and colorful career.

Thomas Keneally has publisher over 25 novels, which have spanned five continents and covered topics ranging from the Armistice talks following World War One, and the unwise peace that was reached in "Gossip from the Forest," to a young woman's fight to the Australian Outback in "Woman of the Inner Sea," to an Edwardian Antarctic expedition involving a mysterious killing in "Victim of the Aurora."

After the Bob Geldof inspired USA For Africa and Feed The World appeals of the mid 1980's, Keneally examined the relationship between politics and famine in "To Asmara," published by Warner Books in 1991. To research the work he traveled alone into rebel-held Etirea, at war with Ethiopia for 30 years. He sheltered from shelling in bunkers by day and moved around under the cover of darkness.

Playmaker, (Simon & Schuster, 1987) based on historical fact, is set in Sydney Cove, the remotest penal colony of the British Empire. It tells the story of the first play to be staged after the European settlement of Australia. The players were the convicts, the director one of their captors. Pctcr Weir and Merchant Ivory will be basing their next movie, which will start production in 1994, on this work.

"Confederates," (Harper & Row, 1979) interweaves the stories of four working class men fighting in the Shenandoah Volunteers at the Battle Antietam.

Keneally has also composed travel narratives on the Southwest of the U.S.A., Ireland, and remotest Australia, and written more than a dozen screenplays. His work has been translated into virtually every published language.

Keneally is a distinguished member of the world literary community. He has four times been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, (which he won in 1982), won the Los Angeles Times prize for Fiction, The Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Critics Circle Award , and a Logie (Australian Emmy). He has been awarded an Order of Australia for Services to Literature, and offered the rank of Commander of the British Empire by the British, which in true republican sentiment he declined. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the Modern Languages Association, has been both chairman and president of the National Book Council of Australia, and has served on such government-appointed bodies as the Australia-China Council and the Australian Constitution Commission.

Keneally has achieved great eminence in the academic world. In 1991 he was made a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. He has also served in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at UCI, which is widely considered to be the best in the United States. 1993 saw Keneally awarded an honorary doctorate in letters from Queensland University, and another will be bestowed on him from the National University of Ireland in 1994. His academic career has also taken him to New York University.

In October of 1993, Keneally was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. During the ceremony, the President of the Academy read a letter that had been received from a Fellow who had just learned of his nomination. The letter talked of upholding the Objectives and traditions of the Academy and, the President revealed, had been written in 1781, seven years before the settlement of Thomas Keneally's own nation. The author of the letter was George Washington.

Just as Washington was the father of his great nation, a crucial force in the period during which the United States gained its independence from Great Britain, Keneally leads the Australian Republican Movement, of which he was the inaugural chairman. This powerful lobby group's objective is to cut Australia's last remaining constitutional ties with the British Monarch. An Australian republic, Keneally believes, will produce a solid economic, social, and cultural identity for a nation whose future is as a member of the Asia Pacific region, not as a kind of sub-Europe. He published "Our Republic" in Australia in 1993, a political, social, and personal anthology of Australia's road to independence.

In 1995 Keneally gave up his post at UCI to concentrate on The Great Shame, his reading of the Irish Diaspora in the nineteenth century world, from the Arctic to the sub-Antarctic, told from the point of view of Irish political prisoners sent to Australia, many of whom escaped to the United States and were politically prominent there. Judy Keneally had two such figures as great grandparents, and Keneally himself similarly had political prisoner forebears. After UCI he continued to live in his native Sydney, Australia, with frequent book-tours and lectures in the United States.

When he appeared on This is Your Life, the program included greetings from Steven Spielberg, Hillary Clinton, Salman Rushdie, Ben Kingsley and Senator Ted Kennedy.

His novels since that time have included A River Town and the recent The Tyrants' Novel (2004), and told the extraordinary tale of Civil War general Dan Sickles in American Scoundrel (2002). His short biography of Lincoln, written under commission for the Viking series of biographies written by novelists, was short-listed for the Lincoln Medal.

In 1999 he was declared an Australian Living Treasure.

The arrival of grandchildren has kept him closer to home, but he covered the 2000 Ethiopian invasion of Eritrea from the Eritrean side, and has a passion for adventure travel, and during 2003 visited the Ross Ice Shelf in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, and dived in a Russian submersible 9,000 feet to the recently discovered hydro-thermal vent, Nine North, on the seabed off Costa Rica.

He is presently writing a novel on the Second World War and a history of early Australia.

Thomas Keneally is a renowned orator who has spoken at events in Southern California, New York, Australia Ireland, the U.K., and Canada He has authored features in publications including The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Color Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Times of London, The Observer, the Independent, the Guardian, Time Magazine, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New Yorker.