It’s the birthday of Australian author Thomas Keneally (b. 1935), who has written over 40 novels and a slew of nonfiction books but is best known for Schindler’s Ark (1982), which Spielberg made into the film Schindler’s List (1993). Schindler’s Ark won the Booker Prize for Fiction, which created some controversy, as some critics said [...]
It’s the birthday of Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), an Australian artist, author, and political cartoonist who wrote and illustrated the classic children’s book The Magic Pudding, which in 2018 celebrated its 100th birthday. Lindsay was born in Creswick, Victoria, Australia, and started drawing for newspapers at 16, ultimately becoming the chief cartoonist at the Sydney Bulletin. [...]
It’s the birthday of Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007), a British-born author who late in life became one of Australia’s most celebrated fiction writers, and whose step-daughter, Susan Swingler, eventually wrote a memoir exposing the elaborate web of lies that Jolley and her husband perpetrated about their family. Jolley was born Monica Elizabeth Knight in Birmingham, England, [...]
It’s the birthday of Australian author Colleen McCullough (1937-2015), who started writing novels to supplement her income as a neurophysiological research assistant at the Yale School of Medicine and whose second novel, The Thorn Birds (1977), landed her a $1.9 million advance and went on to sell more than 30 million copies. So I guess [...]