Thomas Keneally

Keneally spent years in a Catholic seminary before leaving just short of ordination, then worked as a schoolteacher and clerk while beginning to write, becoming one of Australia's most prolific novelists, ranging across historical subjects from convict-era Australia to the Great Irish Famine to apartheid South Africa.

In 1980 he met Leopold Page, a Los Angeles luggage-shop owner and Schindler survivor who had spent years pressing his story on any writer who would listen; Keneally tracked down and interviewed dozens of survivors across the world before writing Schindler's Ark (1982), which won the Booker Prize and was later adapted by Steven Spielberg as Schindler's List.

He has continued publishing steadily into his eighties, remaining a prominent Australian republican and public commentator on the country's literary and political life.