Keneally, Thomas (1935-…), is an Australian writer. He is best known for his historical fiction, which is set in different time periods and on different continents, though primarily in Australia. His work explores the stress of extreme conditions and circumstances on individuals.
Keneally wrote Schindler’s Ark, which won the United Kingdom’s Booker Prize in 1982. The novel, titled Schindler’s List in the United States, tells the true story of a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II (1939-1945). In 1993, the novel was adapted into an internationally acclaimed motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. Keneally wrote an account of how he came to write the book in Searching for Schindler: A Memoir (2008). See Schindler’s List.
Thomas Michael Keneally was born in Sydney on Oct. 7, 1935, and educated there. He trained for the Roman Catholic priesthood but was not ordained. His first novel, The Place at Whitton, was published in 1964. Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) is a story of colonial times in Australia. Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968) takes place in a Sydney seminary and deals with conflict within the Roman Catholic Church. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) is the story of an Aboriginal man caught between two worlds. Keneally based A River Town (1995) on the immigration of his Irish grandfather to Australia about 1900.
Office of Innocence (2003) is a theological murder mystery set in Sydney in 1942, during World War II. The Daughters of Mars (2013) explores the experiences of two Australian nurses during World War I (1914-1918). Shame and the Captives (2013) deals with Italian and Japanese prisoners of war being held as captives in New South Wales in 1944, during World War II. Napoleon’s Last Island (2015) is a historical novel about the exile of French ex-emperor Napoleon I on the island of St. Helena and his friendship there with a young woman who later settled with her family in Australia. In Crimes of the Father (2017), an Australian priest banished to Canada because of his political views returns on a visit and discovers the church’s possible mishandling of sex abuse cases among the Australian clergy. In the novel The Dickens Boy (2021), Keneally creates a fictionalized account of the famous British author Charles Dickens’s youngest son’s emigration to Australia.
Among Keneally’s non-Australian novels, The Survivor (1969) is about Antarctica; Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974) is a fictional story about Joan of Arc; Confederates (1979) is set in the American Civil War (1861-1865); To Asmara (1989) portrays guerrilla warfare in Africa during the 1980’s; and The Tyrant’s Novel (2004) takes place in a modern Middle Eastern dictatorship.
Keneally also wrote Homebush Boy (1995), a memoir of his youth in Australia. The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English Speaking World (1999) is partly a history of the author’s family. American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles (2002) is a biography of an American rogue of the 1800’s. A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia (2006) is a history of the first European settlers in Australia. Another work of history, Three Famines: Starvation and Politics (2011) explores the causes of three famines that took place in Ireland in the 1840’s, the Indian subcontinent in 1943 and 1944, and Ethiopia in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
