In the last Lunchbox/Soapbox event for the year, Thomas Keneally delivers tales from our past – stories of a nation of larrikins and artists, those who dared to ride the waves of contradiction.
Lunchbox/Soapbox is a simple idea: an old-fashioned Speakers’ Corner in the middle of the city, in the middle of the day.
At the Wheeler Centre we’re keen to showcase our writers as thinkers and as artists, as people with passions and peccadilloes. So we’ve come up with Lunchbox/Soapbox: a weekly space for them to sound off on a topic of their choice. Think of it as a 20-minute piece of polemic to give lunching CBD folk something to chew on.
Featuring
Thomas Keneally
Tom Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler's Ark, later made into the Steven Spielberg-directed, Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List. His non-fiction includes the memoir Searching for Schindler and Three Famines, an LA Times Book of the Year, and the histories The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame and American Scoundrel.
His fiction includes Shame and the Captives, The Daughters of Mars, The Widow and Her Hero (shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award), An Angel in Australia and Bettany's Book. His novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete won the Miles Franklin Award. The People's Train was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia division.
His latest book is Napoleon’s Last Island, published by Random House in November 2015.