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 Award-winning motion picture in 1993.
Keneally was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1935. The son of Roman Catholic parents of Irish descent, he was educated at St. Patrick's College in Strathfield, New South Wales, and later studied for the priesthood from 1953 to 1960. While Keneally left the seminary before being ordained, he later drew on his experiences as a seminarian in his early novels The Place at Whitton (1964) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968). He taught high school in Sydney during the early 1960s, and from 1968 to 1970 served as a lecturer in drama at the University of New England in New South Wales. During this time Keneally gained recognition as a historical novelist with the publication of Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), a consideration of Australia's early history as an English penal colony.
