From the Archives, 1982: Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark wins Booker Prize

First published in The Ageon November 30, 1982

Keneally is back happy, not a hippie

For the past three years, Tom Keneally has been threatening his family that he would turn into a middle-aged hippie if his latest (18th) book, ‘Schindler’s Ark’, did not sell.

Thomas Keneally displays his cheque and book, after he was awarded the 1982 Booker Prize.Credit:AP

Yesterday the writer returned home in triumph after winning $18,000 Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious prize for fiction, to a lunch where 200 of his readers paid $20 a head to help him celebrate.

To his audience, which included the writers Morris West, Barry Oakley and Ed Campion, the chairman of the Australia Council, Dr Timothy Pascoe, Mr Justice Michael Kirby, Mrs Jill Wran, a clutch from the Nimrod Theatre, and two Schindler survivors, Mundek and Losia Korn, the glowing author retold the story of his “Hollywood Oskar”.

“I was in Beverly Hills buying a suitcase, and because they take 35 minutes to telex Australia to find if you’re honest when you buy something with an Australian American Express Card, it took so long that the owner, Poldek Phefferberg, started to tell me story of Oskar,” he said.

“Poldek was like the Ancient Mariner… for years he’d been telling the story of Oskar Schindler, the German who saved hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust, to anyone who bought a bag and had literary or film links.”

Six boxes of research papers which Tom Keneally collected when he wrote Schindlers Ark.Credit:Steve Meacham

Mr Keneally listened, and the two-year worldwide search that produced the book began. “Now Poldek is delighted and rushing around Los Angeles autographing copies he said.

Universal Studios and Goldcrest, which made ‘Brideshead Revisited’ are vying for film rights, offering $500,000. Mr Keneally would receive one-third.

The book has already sold 50,000 copies in Britain, 10,000 in Australia, and the American publishers are ecstatic.

Mr Keneally said that only in the past three years had the book that won the Booker suddenly become a best-seller, and he was there the night it began: “I was with Anthony Burgess and after a diet of warm Tiger beer, fed to us from an airline bag by Mrs Burgess, I watched him launch a videotape attack on William Golding who’d won that year’s Booker. That sort of controversy does wonders for a literary prize – as does the introduction of gambling.”

The Booker Prize, said Mr Keneally, confirms how Australia’s international reputation has increased in the past 10 years. “I believe it is largely to do with the success of our films – often films which are lambasted here as falsely sentimental, for example ‘The Man from Snowy River’, but are loved in America,” he said.

“Suddenly we have become vaguely glamorous and now to the belief we are all drunks and tennis players, has been added another, that we are capable of film-making and writing.

“One of the problems we writers faced was that we were placed so low in the literary ladder, akin to Bolivia and the Republic of Chad — or were 10 years ago. The quickest way to make British or American publishers’ eyes glaze was to mention Australia.

“Now our situation is more promising. People not only have a geographic curiosity, but an artistic curiosity about Australia as well. People are disposed more than ever before to consider Australian books. I think we should savour this and be calmer about our increasing stature… I would like to hope this Booker Prize will be yet another nail in the coffin of the cultural cringe.”

The ever diligent Mr Keneally is now at work on his 19th book, on the Australian outback, the past, the present and the future.

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