Schindler's List

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction

Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers.

Working with the actual testimony of Schindler's Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.

Thomas Keneally was born in 1936 and raised in the rugged expanse of Australia. As a young man, he planned to join the priesthood, but by 1960, on the verge of the Vietnam War, Keneally found the church in such moral turmoil that he decided it was impossible to go through with his ordination.

Keneally received his formal education in Sydney, Australia. Over the past 30 years, he has published over 25 novels, more than a dozen screenplays, and several works of non-fiction. These works include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The Playmaker, Season in Purgatory, A Family Madness, and Woman of the Inner Sea. His work has been nominated four times for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1982 for Schindler's List. He won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, The Miles Franklin Award, The Critics Circle Award, and a Logie (Australian Emmy).

A self-described "literary biker," Keneally has traveled through Australia, Iceland, Antarctica, America, Eastern Europe, roaming across genres and topics, often championing the underdog. "I'm a writer who's always been hard to pin down," Keneally says, "because I've sometimes written about things that are none of my concern -- like the American South or Antarctica or Australian aboriginals or the Holocaust. I think I appeal to 'hells angels' kind of writers." Keneally has modeled many of his characters after the traditional Australian hero -- the "battler." "In America everyone admires successful men and women. In Australia, they suspect them. The Australian hero is the person to whom everything has happened -- drought, fire, flood."

Oskar Schindler is a classic Keneally character -- conflicted and flawed, the antithesis of a one-dimensional altruistic saint. And Schindler's story is a classic Keneally story -- an ordinary man placed in a situation of enormous moral dilemma.

While researching Schindler's List, the author spent two years traveling to eight countries, where he interviewed many of Schindler's Jews and read the numerous testimonies which are held at the Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority, Yad Vasbem, Israel.

Keneally lives in California where he teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of California, Irvine, where he holds a Distinguished Professorship.

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