Tom Keneally Centre | SMSA (original) (raw)

As well as being a celebrated novelist, Thomas Keneally is a gifted historian whose non-fiction brings depth, empathy and narrative force to the past.

His landmark history The Great Shame (1998) traces the story of Irish convict transportation with rare moral clarity, giving voice to individuals who endured exile, injustice and resistance. That same sense of intimacy and scale is present in The Commonwealth of Thieves (2005), which revisits Australia’s penal origins through the experiences of Aboriginal people, convicts and colonial officials, always with the goal of bringing history closer to the reader.

In recent years, Keneally has collaborated with his daughter Meg Keneally on the popular Monsarrat series — a collection of historical mysteries set in 19th-century Australia. Titles include The Soldier’s Curse (2016), The Unmourned (2017), The Power Game (2018), and The Ink Stain (2019).

His most recent novel, Fanatic Heart (2022), reimagines the life of Irish patriot John Mitchel, with a particular focus on his time in exile on Van Diemen’s Land. The book continues Keneally’s lifelong work of animating history through character, conflict, and conscience.

Over the course of his career, Keneally has received numerous accolades, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Prize, the Scripter Award, the Mondello International Prize and the 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize for Corporal Hitler’s Pistol.

He lives in Sydney with his wife Judy and is the proud number one ticket-holder of the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles.