Thomas Keneally (born 1935) is an Australian novelist and nonfiction writer who gained worldwide attention when his best-known work, the Holocaust novel Schindler's List, was adapted into an Academy A...
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Late in his fourth decade as a published author, Thomas Keneally has turned his well-honed techniques as a novelist to works of popular history. The first of them was The Great Shame (1998), his accou...
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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 prod...
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Critical Essay by Robert E. Mcdowell
In the course of doing research for a World War I film script, the Australian Thomas Keneally was, fortunately for novel readers, sidetracked into an exhaustive st...
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Critical Essay by George Steiner
Thomas Keneally is frequently spoken of as "the other" major Australian novelist. But in the present instance comparison is unfair. "Season in Pur...
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Critical Essay by Peter Ackroyd
Although the publishers describe [A Victim of the Aurora] as 'Thomas Keneally's first detective story', it effectively marks the demise of that deb...
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Critical Essay by Neil Hepburn
There is no more diligent soothsayer than Thomas Keneally, forever poking about among the entrails of the European past for some clue, previously missed, to the developm...
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Critical Essay by Vivian Fuchs
The early years of this century were the heroic years of Antarctic exploration and it is in this period that A Victim of the Aurora is set. The pity is that, unreal thou...
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Yardley
You can read [Victim of the Aurora] on several levels, all of them entertaining and provocative. It is an adventure story, the tale of an expedition to Antarctica in...
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Critical Essay by Blake Morrison
Thomas Keneally's fictions are widely travelled: medieval Normandy, an 18th-century penal colony in the South Pacific, France in 1918, the Antarctic (twice)...
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Critical Essay by Hermione Lee
Keneally's newest narrator [in Passenger] is a foetus, a pugnacious little fellow who's been jolted into omniscience by a hologram taken to establish his s...
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Critical Essay by D. J. Enright
At first sight, the donnée of Thomas Keneally's new novel [Passenger] lies in its narrator, a foetus…. 'The rose or weed of knowledge opened...
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Critical Essay by Lucy Hughes-hallet
The narrator of Thomas Keneally's Passenger hasn't been born yet and at certain points in the course of the story it begins to look doubtful whether ...
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Critical Essay by Daphne Merkin
"Passenger" is a wonderfully poised novel. It rattles along at great speed without ever missing out on the telling, piquantly humorous detail. Mr. Keneall...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Vaughan
War, like the sea is slow to give up its dead; any verdict on a novel of war so immediately overwhelming as Thomas Keneally's ['Confederates'] sh...
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Critical Essay by Michael Ratcliffe
I confess to finding the randy villain of that uterine jest [Passenger] a more sharply conceived and executed figure than any of those who toil through the mud and ...
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Critical Essay by Alan L. Mcleod
A Victim of the Aurora, a detective story concerned with homosexuality on a polar expedition, demonstrates that the author is wholly out of his métier, raises s...
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Critical Essay by Veronica Brady
Thomas Keneally has always aimed at high seriousness. His works reveal an epic ambition, attempting to reconcile with domestic reality the consciousness of some larger...
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Critical Essay by Andrew Motion
History intimidates fiction. It threatens the play of the imagination by confronting it with unavoidable facts, and obtrudes actual incidents upon provocative invention...
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Critical Essay by Edmund Fuller
[In Passenger, Thomas Keneally] has written the first novel to have its narrator and protagonist in utero throughout: the child in the womb of Sal Fitzgerald. With para...
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Critical Essay by A. L. Mcleod
[Keneally] has impressed most readers and critics with his incredibly fecund invention and his impressively felicitous phrases in a dozen books written during the same n...
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Critical Essay by Jeffrey Burke
"Confederates" is exceptional in the Keneally corpus for its American—namely, Civil War—setting, yet typical of an author who has continuall...
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In the following essay, Cantrell traces the development of Keneally's novels through Bring Larks and Heroes.
Thomas Keneally was born in Sydney in 1935. He has written two plays and three novel...
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In the review below, Conrad finds the arguments and production values of Memoirs from a Young Republic "shockingly amateurish.".
Writers are the makers and the keepers of a nation'...
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In the essay below, Pierce examines the motives of Keneally's detractors.
While Thomas Keneally himself generously acknowledges that 'the critics made me', few Australian authors&...
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In the following review, McCulloughassesses the narrative style of A River Town.
Traditionally, the annual announcement of the Booker Prize, Britain's most famous fiction award, comes accompani...
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In the following review, Hospital emphasizes the millennial tone of A River Town, comparing the novel's themes on Australia in 1900 to comtemporary Australian experience.
There is something abo...
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In the following essay, Ryan compares the authorial perspectives of Schindler's List, Günter Grass's Show Your Tongue, and Marguerite Duras's The Lover, to account for the ...
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In the following essay, Hospital characterizes Keneally's protagonists as movern-day Jeremiahs, interspersing her analysis with an interview of Keneally, in which he discusses political aspects...
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In the following essay, Monk traces the progress of Halloren's apotheosis in Bring Larks and Heroes as a function of the narrative's inversion of conventional and pastoral tropes, relate...
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In the following interview, Keneally discusses the function of history in his fiction, the significance of his non-Australian settings, and his fictional use of historical facts.
[Hergenhan:] A number...
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In the following essay, English examines the subjective bases of the authorial consciousness that informs Keneally's novels, emphasizing specifically the textual connections between his own bio...
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In the essay below, Petersson investigates the parallels between Keneally's use of German imagery and the Australian cultural experience, correlating German traits to similar Australian values....
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In the following review, Swickfaults The Place Where Souls are Born for its "confused mosiac" of Native American history and for Keneally's dependence on secondary sources.
Here i...
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In the following review, Schaeffer outlines the plot and themes of Woman of the Inner Sea.
What would you do if you were a happily married woman whose husband had an affair with a woman who came to ob...
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In the following review of Woman of the Inner Sea, Rifkind focuses on the characterization of the book's heroine.
Australia, like America, was built on the promise of reinvention. Live here, it...
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Thomas Keneally
Thomas (Michael) Keneally
