Thomas Keneally Thomas Keneally Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is a prolific Australian novelist, playwright, and essayist. He is best known for writing "Schindler's Ark", the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. The book would later be adapted to Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List", which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Both Keneally's parents (Edmund Thomas Keneally and Elsie Margaret Coyle) were born to Irish fathers in the timber and dairy town of Kempsey, New South Wales, and, though born in Sydney, his early years were also spent
Schindler's Ark saving 1,200 Jews from concentration camps all over Poland and Germany. It is a work of historical fiction which describes actual people and places with fictional events, dialogue and scenes added by the author and reconstructed dialogue where exact details are unknown. Keneally wrote a number of well received novels before and after "Schindler's Ark"; however, it has since gone on to become his most well-known and celebrated work. Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor, inspired Keneally to write "Schindler's Ark". After the war, Pfefferberg had tried on a number of occasions to interest the screenwriters and filmmakers he met through