An Australian Catholic with no immediate ties to the Holocaust, Thomas Keneally had written sixteen novels before Schindler's List (first published as Schindler's Ark, 1982) and has continued to produce a steady literary output since then. In addition to his fiction, he has written several plays, the text for books of photography, an epic historical account of the Irish Diaspora, and a biography of an American Civil War general. Schindler's List, however, remains not only his best-known book but also one of the most widely read novels in all of Holocaust literature. Yet, in no other work has he returned to the subject, unlike many other writers who came back to the Holocaust obsessively because of its inherent power or because it played such a dominant role in their own or their families' lives.

Born on 7 October 1935 to Edmund Thomas and Elsie (née Coyle) Keneally in New...