Thomas Keneally Schepisi's "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith" (1978) (based on his own novel) and played Father Marshall in the award-winning film "The Devil's Playground" (1976), also by Schepisi. In 1983, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). He is an Australian Living Treasure. Keneally was a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council from 1985 to 1988 and President of the National Book Council from 1985 to 1989. Keneally was a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) where he taught the graduate fiction workshop for one quarter in 1985. From 1991 to
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