TOM KENEALLY CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF GREATNESS Tom Keneally is one of Australia’s and the world’s most successful writers, having been nominated three times for theb Booker Prize and winning it once. He is the author of more than 40 published works and has won several other prizes including two Miles Franklin Awards, the Scripter Award of the University of Southern California, the Mondello International Prize, the Gold Medal of the University of California, the Helmerich Prize (U.S.) and a Logie Award, an AFI Award and the Critics Circle Award for his screenplays. Thomas Michael Keneally was born in Kempsey on October 7, 1935 and went to school on the north coast of New South Wales and in the western suburbs of Sydney. Like so many other Australian authors, he was taught to be literate by the Christian Brothers. In adolescence, in the remote Australia of the 50s, he studied for the priesthood but did not take orders. After this adventure, he worked in a variety of jobs including high school teaching and had his first short story published in The Bulletin. During one Christmas break, he decided to write a novel which Cassell in Great Britain agreed to publish – before going broke. The first novel was The Place at Whitton, published in 1964. Ignorance of the realities of publishing led Tom to believe there was a living to be made in professional writing in Australia in the 60s and it was only this ‘wrong-headedness’ that allowed him to survive. While working as a part-time insurance collector in Newtown and Marrickville he completed a second novel, The Fear (1965) and received a Commonwealth Literary fund grant, which allowed him to write Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) marking the beginning of a career as a full-time professional. This novel won the Miles Franklin Award in 1967, as did Three Cheers for the Paraclete in 1968. The Survivor (1969) was awarded equal first prize in the Cook Bicentenary Award. He spent 1968-69 on an expedition to the South Pole with a US Party and then as a Lecturer in Drama, University of New England. He lived 1970-71 in England and there wrote A Dutiful Daughter and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), which later won The Royal Society for Literature Prize and became a film directed by Fred Schepisi, who he had worked with previously as an actor in Schepisi’s movie The Devil’s Playground (1976). He continued publishing novels and the occasional play. (He remembers sharing a season at the Parade with a barely-known, lanky young fellow from Melbourne named David Williamson.) His novel writing then entered a historical war phase with Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974), Gossip from the Forest (1975), Season in Purgatory (1976) and A Victim of the Aurora (1977). He lived and gave lectures in America during 1975-76, gathering information for a book on the South called Confederates, ultimately published by Collins in 1980. Confederates was his third novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in Great Britain. He has also written a non-fiction work about the American South-West called The Place Where Souls are Born. For further information contact Karen Raid (02) 8923 9832 | [email protected] TOM KENEALLY Tom also wrote a children’s story, Ned Kelly and the City of Bees (1978), the allegorical novel Passenger (1979) and The Cut Rate Kingdom (1981) which was first published by the Bulletin magazine. One day in Beverly Hills Tom met a luggage merchant who told him the story of Schindler’s Ark (1982), which, with its controversial blending of fact and fiction, won him the prestigious Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and led to Steven Spielberg and Universal Studios commissioning him to write the screenplay. In the meantime he served on the Australia-Chinab Council, an organisation which operates under the aegis of the Department of Foreign Affairs. In 1982 he travelled extensively in the Northern Territory to write a book called Outback with photographs by Gary Hansen and Mark Lang. In 1983, he was presented with the Order of Australia for his services to literature. As an Australian republican, Tom refused the aware of Commander of the British Empire in 1977. In 1984, he wrote for the Herald and Weekly Times group and the Sydney Morning Herald at the Los Angeles Olympics. The next novel, A Family Madness (1985) was written as a follow-up to Schindler’s Ark. In 1985 a play, Bullie’s House, was performed at the Long Wharf Theatre on the West Coast of the United States. He was then Writer in Residence at the University of California, at Irvine and a member of the Advisory Committee to the Constitutional Commission 1985-88 back in Australia. Of Thomas Keneally’s novel Towards Asmara (1989), about war and famine in Eritrea and Ethiopia, The New York Times Book Review wrote: “Not since For Whom the Bell Tolls has a book of such sophistication, the work of a major international novelist, spoken out so ambiguously on behalf of an armed struggle.” Tom was later an official observer in the Eritrean Referendum in 1993. Moral dilemmas have long been the making of Keneally’s thought-provoking fiction and such is the case in Flying Hero Class (1991), his novel centring on the loyalty, terror and revolutionary fervour that arises when Palestinian guerrillas hijack a plane with an Aboriginal dance troupe on board. In 1992 Tom published a travel book about Ireland, Now and In Time to Be, and another novel Women of the Inner Sea. From 1992-1994, he was a member of the Publishing Committee of the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington D.C. His next novel, Jacko (1993) was a brilliant fable about the power of television and features one of Keneally’s most finely crafted characters, the great Australian hero Jacko Emptor. In 1993 Steven Spielberg’s incredibly successful film Schindler’s List catapulted Tom to a new level of recognition. Tom’s next novel, A River Town was published in 1995 to critical acclaim at home, and in London and New York alike. A memoir of his sixteenth year, Homebush Boy, was then published – The Australian called it ‘a brilliant and evocative slice of Australian social history’. His non-fiction work The Great Shame, a story of the Irish in the Old World and the New was published in 1998 and his American Scoundrel was published in March 2002. His novel Bettany’s Book published in 2000 prompted The Australian to say ‘Should we still be seeking the Great Australian Novel, this could be it’. In October 2003 Tom wrote An Angel in Australia to critical acclaim and in 2004 he wrote The Tyrant’s Novel, a gripping thriller set in an imaginary world, and a children’s book Roos in Shoes illustrated by Gillian Johnson, about the iconic Australian animal. His next non-fiction work, The Commonwealth of Thieves (2003) looked upon the penal origins of Australia in a way which sought to make the reader feel close to the experience of individual Aboriginals, convicts and officials. He has tried to bring the same intimacy and sense of surprise to his histories of Australians: Origins to Eureka (2009) and Eureka to the Diggers (2011). Tom continued to write historical war fiction, publishing titles such as The Widow and Her Hero (2007), The People’s Train (2009) and The Daughters of Mars (2012). For further information contact Karen Raid (02) 8923 9832 | [email protected] TOM KENEALLY His most recent novel is Shame and the Captives (2013) in which he explores the intimacies of ordinary life played out against momentous world events. Most recently, his play Transport, based on his wife’s grandmother’s story, opened in New York at the Irish Repertory Theatre in February of this year. The third volume of his history of Australians will be published in November 2014. Tom has worked for the Asthma Foundation and is an ambassador for the Cerebral Palsy Foundation as well as vice-patron of the Bilgola Surf Life Saving Club for the last twenty years. He has been chairman of the Australian Society of Authors and a committee member of PEN Sydney Centre. In 2009, ab signed copy of his short biography of Abraham Lincoln published in 2003, was given by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to President Obama of the United States as a state gift. Tom also holds a number of national and international honorary doctorates and is particularly proud of one awarded by the National University of Ireland. Tom married Judith and raised two daughters who grew up thinking it was normal for a father to stay at home sweating onto blank pieces of paper. He has four grandchildren, Rory, Alexandra, Clementine and Augustus. He was the founding chairman of the Australian Republican Movement and is a present member of the Board of Constitutional Education Fund of Australia. He is currently also the co-editor of Another Country, a PEN collection of asylum seeker writings, and A Country Too Far, a collection of leading Australian writers on the asylum seeker issue. When not writing, lecturing or attending speaking engagements, Tom enjoys politician-watching, swimming, cryptic crosswords, telling anecdotes about his brilliant daughters, hiking, watching the Manly Sea Eagles play and cross-country skiing. G PLACEATWHITTON The Place at Whitton is Tom Keneally’s first novel, now released with a new author’s note about the fifty years of writing since its original publication.