AustLit

'Until Tom Keneally won the Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark in 1982, the author bio in his books always included the line, ‘He trained for several years for the Catholic priesthood but did not take Orders’. As a young man, Keneally ran up against a psychosomatic paralysis telling him he could not commit to an institution that frowned on literary pursuits, sent a few of its postulants mad, and showed a lack of charity towards its own. It pushed Keneally onto the street and into writing. Historian John Molony, friend and fellow ex-seminarian, once told Keneally that he would not become a great novelist until he had written the church out of his system. If his publishers thought he had, and dropped mention of his church ties once he got to the Schindler story, in fact, his continued exploration of how mortal weakness, religious ideals and institutional tyrannies are enmeshed has constituted the core of his art over a long career.' (Introduction)