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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Tom Keneally is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Booker Prize winner, Miles Franklin winner… He’s also a very hard writer to pigeon-hole. His fiction incorporates so much real life and his non-fiction reads like the best creative fiction. And at the core of all of his work is a love of history. (Introduction)
Reading Australia
This work has Reading Australia teaching resources.
Unit Suitable For Australian Senior Secondary Curriculum: English Unit 2, with some lessons suitable with adaptations to suit AC: English Year 10.
Themes
Australian history, Australian landscape, convict history, literature
General Capabilities
Critical and creative thinking, Ethical understanding, Information and communication technology, Intercultural understanding, Literacy, Personal and social
Cross-curriculum Priorities
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures
Notes
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Transcript available on website.
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Show notes
- Tom was captivated by Walter Scott as a child, and Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans had a profound impact on him. As a teenager, his ‘literary TNT’ became the works of T. S. Elliot, Virginia Wolf, and George Eliot, as well as Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.
- His early writing was influenced by the historian Edmund Campion and the journalist Brian Johns.
- Tom believes both Judith Wright and Kenneth Slessor were undervalued during their lifetimes, and that Patrick White is Australia’s ‘lonely nunatak of excellence. He also adores the works of Thea Astley and Helen Garner.
- Tom refers to Canberra poet Mark O’Connor and John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
- The Rerum novarum Tom refers to is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891.
- Tom worked with the award winning Australian director Fred Schepisi on the adaption of his novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (he also had a minor role in the film).
- Schindler’s Ark (later renamed Schindler’s List) was influenced by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
- When reflecting on what makes a novelist, Tom quotes fellow Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai.
- Tom now co-writes with his daughter, Meg Keneally, and discusses their writing process for Unmourned.
