Thomas Keneally – November 2015

Tom is a playwright, author of non-fiction and renowned and prolific novelist. Best known for Schindler’s Ark – inspired by Holocaust survivor Poldek Pfefferberg and adapted for the screen as Schindler’s List – his novel,  A Family Madness, was also inspired by a true incident and focuses on Rudi Kabbel, a survivor of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. His play, Either Or, centres on SS officer Kurt Gerstein, so tortured by his role in disseminating the chemicals used in the gas chambers that he tried to stop a shipment and warn the Allies about the extermination camps. His novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, also based on an actual incident and made into a film, is written in the first person. (Tom has said he would not now presume to write in the voice of an Aborigine, but would have written the story as seen by a white character.) His play, Bullie’s House, features a majority black cast and explores issues of cultural clash and possible accommodation. Amongst Tom’s other historically based novels are The Survivor, about Alec Ramsey, sole survivor of a disastrous Arctic expedition, and A Victim of the Aurora, a detective story set on an Antarctic expedition beset by hunger, absolute darkness, and murder. Tom is an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and an Australian Living Treasure.

The Tyrant’s Novel
Doubleday, 2003; ISBN 9781864710717
In an oil-rich country terrorised by a tyrant known only as The Great Uncle, war veteran and celebrated writer Alan Sheriff has a better life than most until his beautiful and beloved actress wife Sarah dies – and he is made an offer he can’t refuse. He must write a great novel in three months – or else. If the writer no longer cares about his own life, he has friends. What follows is a terrifying trial as he battles with his conscience, Sarah’s memory, a good woman who wants to rescue him, a dark secret – and the most important deadline of his life. The novel is told from the point of view of Sheriff after he has arrived in Australia as a refugee and been incarcerated in a detention centre.

A Dutiful Daughter
Angus and Robertson, 1971; ISBN 9780207954238
Shocked at the onset of puberty and the catastrophe she believes it brought on her parents, Barbara has since been a most dutiful daughter. Bound in dominance over them, she tends her afflicted parents and manages beasts and land single-handedly on the isolated marshlands of Campbell’s Reach. It is her brother Damian who reveals the secrets the family has shared for thirteen years and as the destructive forces within each of them move towards a climax, Barbara is impelled to make the ultimate sacrifice. Tom’s personal favourite, this novel is about loneliness and sickness of the mind; a little piece of madness set in a deserted corner of Australia; a thought experiment into what might happen to the heads of people abandoned on a corner of the earth with nobody but themselves for company.