In short
BBC In the Studio profiles Thomas Keneally in Sydney as he approaches what may be his last book, while reflecting on aging, writing habits, and a major new essay about Mungo Man, the 40,000-year-old skeleton found in NSW in 1974.
Guest backgrounds
Thomas Keneally is the Schindler’s List author (originally Schindler’s Ark), winner of the International Booker Prize; he’s 90, lives in Manly, and has written 50+ fiction and non-fiction works, with Irish Catholic roots and interests in Australian convict history and Aboriginal culture. Rachel Naylor is the interviewer. Judy and daughter Meg Keneally appear briefly as family context.
Key claims
Mungo Man’s story could “change” how Australians view Aboriginal possession; Keneally’s first-ever writing hiatus (3–4 months) followed an abandoned non-fiction-to-novel attempt; he’s “tormented” without a book and aims to write “the best book ever” over 90.
Notable examples
his writing setup (black laptop, notes, Oscar replica from Schindler’s List film success); Montserrat series; a planned film adaptation via Baz Luhrmann; his North Head bushwalk routine; the abandoned Irish murder manuscript after publisher advice.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring Sydney with Thomas Keneally
2:15 to 4:39
Join Thomas as he shows Rachel around his neighborhood and shares stories about his life.
“a hilly suburb in the north of the city, surrounded by beaches and the Sydney Harbour National Park.”
Inside Thomas Keneally's Writing Space
4:39 to 7:30
Discover where Thomas writes and the memorabilia that inspires him.
“Thomas has agreed to spend a few days with me, but he tells me that his wife Judy's in hospital and he too has medical appointments this week.”
Thomas Keneally on His New Book
7:30 to 11:10
Learn about Thomas's latest project on Mungoman and its significance.
“This is from the time I escaped a crocodile up in the Northern Territory.”
Reflections on Aging and Writing
11:10 to 14:02
Thomas shares his thoughts on aging, retirement, and his writing ambitions.
“Let me know if you need to take a break.”
Reflections on Writing and Ambition
14:02 to 17:43
Thomas Keneally shares his thoughts on writing and his recent struggles.
“Anyhow, we all go through this process if we're lucky.”
Navigating Challenges in Writing
18:11 to 24:34
Discussion on the challenges of writing, health issues, and distractions.
“valid to participating locations, terms and conditions apply.”
The Impact of Age on Writing
24:34 to 28:00
Keneally discusses how aging influences his writing and ambitions.
“We're walking back downhill towards Manly.”
Reflections on Aging and Creativity
28:00 to 28:33
Thomas Keneally shares his thoughts on the challenges of aging and writing.
“And if I find that I'm too old, well, I'm too old.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Thomas Keneally:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
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1:44Thomas Keneally:This is the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Rachel Naylor. It's March 2026 and I'm in Sydney, Australia, meeting the author Thomas Keneally as he writes what could potentially be his last book. He's best known for writing Schindler's Ark, the book behind Schindler's List, for which he won the International Booker Prize. Thomas is now 90 and he lives in Manly, a hilly suburb in the north of the city, surrounded by beaches and the Sydney Harbour National Park. This is my first work trip outside of England, and I've really landed on my feet. It's basically paradise. It's lunchtime on a beautiful sunny Tuesday, and Thomas is meeting me on the Corso, a bustling main street by the promenade.
2:39Thomas Keneally:There's children playing in the fountains, there's people queuing for gelato, and up there there's couples having drinks in a rooftop bar overlooking the sea. Wearing beaded bracelets and a flat cap Thomas is leading me to an underground car park To his white Hyundai sedan There you go Thank you so much Cheers
3:03Rachel Naylor:Now I know you found the car park a fascinating Exemplate of its kind But it should be all fun from this point I'm just going to take you up, show you the beach and where we live, and show you the hinterland. Where I live is in Dauphin City, because lots of people lead fairly active lives.
3:40Thomas Keneally:We're passing surfers, walking barefoot in their wetsuits back to their cars. There's swimmers taking a dip in the tidal pool. There's people playing volleyball on the beach. And we're surrounded by hikers.
3:53Rachel Naylor:And there's the entrance of the harbour. Wow. Right here. And that's the view that brings me out here all the time.
4:05Thomas Keneally:I can understand that.
4:08Rachel Naylor:Now, I live on the premises of a college for the priesthood, which is no longer that, is a university college. So I'll take you around where we live.
4:29Thomas Keneally:We're on a quiet road surrounded by neat gardens and yellow signs saying to watch out for bandicoots.
4:35Rachel Naylor:We are actually tenants of the church. Wow, you're incredible.
4:39Thomas Keneally:Thomas has agreed to spend a few days with me, but he tells me that his wife Judy's in hospital and he too has medical appointments this week. We go into his white three-bed apartment. Meg, I brought Rachel just to see where I work. His daughter, Meg Keneally, is staying.
5:01Rachel Naylor:Sorry, Rachel, that you found us at sixes and sevens.
5:03Thomas Keneally:She tells me she's dad-sitting. for Tommy, as she and her children call him. Well, I mean, you came all this way. How's it stacked up against what you expected? Together, they wrote the Montserrat series about the gentleman convict Hugh Montserrat and his Irish sidekick, Mrs Mulrooney, who go around solving murders in the 1800s.
5:26Rachel Naylor:There we are. I work in a little library in a deliberately non-distracting corner.
5:37Thomas Keneally:We go into a messy, small, slightly underwhelming room.
5:41Rachel Naylor:There's very little reason to the books. It depends on remembering where they are. They're whatever curious thing I'm pursuing at that time and they're also copies of my own work. There's a classic big desk which I don't use and has traditionally been used to carry loads of books so I don't normally write on it. It becomes a depository. Instead, facing away from his view of the patio, there's a black laptop on a smaller desk in the corner.
6:21Thomas Keneally:And this is where you sit and write? Yes, that above all. It's covered with notes
6:28Rachel Naylor:Which are unreadable to anyone but me And it's next to a printer, a landline, more books
6:36Thomas Keneally:as well as some cashew nuts and a packet of fudge And what's that post-it?
6:41Rachel Naylor:Ah, I love you Tommy
6:44Thomas Keneally:This little square note with hearts on was scrawled by his granddaughter when she was little
6:49Rachel Naylor:You are special, that's what it says Yes
6:55Thomas Keneally:And here there's a tiny replica Oscar for when his book Schindler's List was made into the film.
7:01Rachel Naylor:This is from a cake I got when the movie was such a success and won seven Oscars. None of them for the writer of the original work, which is normal Oscar stuff.
7:18Thomas Keneally:The walls are jam-packed with a real mix of memorabilia.
7:22Rachel Naylor:Now, Judy hangs up most of this stuff, but I don't stop her. Awards, photos, tickets, a caricature. This is from the time I escaped a crocodile up in the Northern Territory. All that happened was I escaped it because it didn't want me. It ran in front of me, right in front of me.
7:47Thomas Keneally:And what's this?
7:49Rachel Naylor:Oh, that's my elevation to being a national treasure. I'm familiar with the term, but in England it's just a phrase.
7:59Thomas Keneally:Here it's an actual certificate.
8:00Rachel Naylor:It's an actual certificate, yeah. They had a vote. I was in New Zealand once making a documentary and I remember a bureaucrat telling a New Zealand ferry captain that I was a national treasure and the ferry captain looked at me and said, Yeah?
8:29Rachel Naylor:It really impressed him. Well, that's about it.
8:40Thomas Keneally:Thomas has written more than 50 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and we're surrounded by most of them.
8:50Thomas Keneally:Throughout his back catalogue, there are nods to his Irish Catholic background, his brief stint training to be a priest before he turned to writing, and his fascination with Australian history, especially its convict sites and Aboriginal culture. The reason I'm here now is to witness him writing his latest book an essay about Mungoman a 40 ,000 year old skeleton that was discovered in New South Wales in 1974 It rewrote Australia's history as for decades it was considered the country's oldest remains
9:24Rachel Naylor:I'm at least a quarter way through it and I hope it'll be finished this year
9:34Thomas Keneally:And do you remember when you found out about Mungoman?
9:39Rachel Naylor:I found out quite by accident by visiting the site and I've been back a number of times. I came from a town where there was an Aboriginal tribe called the Thunguddy and there are all sorts of restrictive laws on them. there was one law that said they must be back in their settlement by sundown and that always interested me that it was their country but they had to be out of town by six so this is a story that validates aboriginal possession of australia if Mungo Man had been a pharaoh he would be one of the two or three most famous people in Australian history they would already have a hotel out there and touring going on but we're not as impressed by Mungo as others might be
10:56Thomas Keneally:Well this book may change that
10:59Rachel Naylor:I hope so. That'd be wonderful if it did. I'm sorry about the shaking leg. I won't stop it.
Read the full transcript
11:08Thomas Keneally:Oh, don't worry about it. Let me know if you need to take a break.
11:11Rachel Naylor:I might get a coffee if that's OK.
11:14Thomas Keneally:Of course it is, yeah. The more we speak, the more I realise how many projects Thomas has on the go, and how many he wants to start. There's the next instalment in the Montserrat series. It's getting there, but it's not quite finished.
11:31Rachel Naylor:It's been delayed. I'd like to do 12 of Montserrat and Mrs Mulrooney. We'll see if we get there.
11:44Thomas Keneally:A book about a steward of Keneally Land in Ireland being executed in 1895. Well, I interviewed relatives and others about this murder that occurred on ancestral land. And the story of Judy's convict, Great Granny. Who was sent from the female factory, a prison for women, in Parramatta,
12:12Rachel Naylor:given 10 shillings to get to a remote place in the bush where her master would begin to use her as a servant.
12:30Thomas Keneally:It's now Tuesday evening and we carry on our conversation in one of Thomas's favourite seafood restaurants. He loves the grilled barramundi fish, which today comes with beetroot and feta. We're sitting at a table in the open air overlooking the marina.
12:49Rachel Naylor:Your health, young nailer.
12:52Thomas Keneally:And to you.
12:54Rachel Naylor:You're meeting me at the true beginning of old age now. How does that feel? Inevitable. and I'm willing to wait it out and see what happens. I'll be dependent on people to allow me writing time from now on too. It'll be dependent on people doing things I should otherwise do, like cook and so on. When you're a writer, people think, oh, your time is so precious. And it is, but it's not more precious than iron laundry.
13:54Thomas Keneally:Do you think about retiring?
13:57Rachel Naylor:Yes, and I've accepted it's not the worst thing that could happen. but I nearly came to woe resisting it. I became very ill resisting it. Anyhow, we all go through this process if we're lucky. It ends with death, of course. I don't feel like dancing in the street about that. but my ambition is to write the best book ever written by a novelist over 90
14:36Thomas Keneally:that was fatuously one of my aims thank you thank you thank you very much wow
14:48Rachel Naylor:Hey, that's a huge prawn.
14:51Thomas Keneally:They really are.
14:53Rachel Naylor:Well, let's take a monster and... I'm going to get there in the end.
15:04Rachel Naylor:I was talking to a man who makes movies. His name's Baz Luhrmann. Do you know of Baz? Of course. he's going to make a book of mine called Blood Red Sister Rose into a movie and he said that when he's making a movie he never wants to make another he never intends to make another but then it all happens, the thing is finished and then he falls in love with the subject. Then he wants to make that. He told us astounding things of how depressed he gets between movies. And how much... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir.
16:06Thomas Keneally:And do you relate to that?
16:08Rachel Naylor:Yes. You're depressed unless you've got a book. But you're tormented all through it. This is yummy, is that OK?
16:20Thomas Keneally:Thomas confesses he recently suffered his first rejection. His publisher advised him to rework his non-fiction book on the Irish murder.
16:29Rachel Naylor:They suggested I do it as a novel. I started doing it and I found that I just couldn't. I couldn't do it because people had bared their souls to tell you stuff on the understanding it was non-fiction. And so I abandoned the novel and have been a little adrift ever since. So I'm finding my voice again and finding my purpose. I've got a few things underway but not manically pursued like they should be the question I've got to face is is this a sign that I've reached the end or is it just something that happened is it something that could happen when you were 30 so you wonder if it is an odomini
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18:21Thomas Keneally:Thomas is famous for being a prolific writer, often writing 1 ,500 words a day and averaging a book a year since his first in 1964. And I'm here to see how he does it. The only problem is, he's not writing. A combination of his and his wife's poor health and a book being abandoned has forced Thomas to take his first ever hiatus. I mean, writers only write when they have no other option.
18:56Rachel Naylor:they want to write but when they get down to writing all the things they said about their work all the things they like to talk to people like you about don't occur they would have occurred the night before when you were dazzling your friends with your proposed novel
19:19Thomas Keneally:Do you find that you're easily distracted? No, not, and it's often self-destruction. If I work through to 11, flat out, I might say, I wonder what today's Guardian crossword looks like. If I'm writing fair dinkum, writing true prose or trying to,
19:49Rachel Naylor:I work in the morning. and then there's often a break after lunch where I go for a bushwalk and listen to a recorded book.
20:04Thomas Keneally:It's Wednesday morning and I'm back at Thomas' house to do just that. We're going for a hike, his usual loop around North Head and I'm a little bit nervous. It's going to be 27 degrees today and I'm pretty sure he's going to be fitter than me, despite the fact he's got a pacemaker and he's 90.
20:25Rachel Naylor:We'll start the less...
20:32Rachel Naylor:..exotic part.
20:36Thomas Keneally:Do you ever find when you're listening to audiobooks that you're editing them in your head?
20:44Rachel Naylor:No. I've got enough trouble editing my head. we can go up here. No, I do it purely for the delight of it.
20:58Thomas Keneally:Why is this your go-to walk? What do you like about it?
21:03Rachel Naylor:I particularly like the vegetation, the disorder. It's its own place, you know. It's not trying to be like anywhere else. and we haven't seen a quarter of its beauty yet and it's a way of keeping fit. Good morning, how are you?
21:29Thomas Keneally:Do you find you get recognised very often?
21:32Rachel Naylor:Yes, occasionally, yes. I find it delightful to be recognised for your work as long as they don't want you to read their book.
21:50Thomas Keneally:Just be aware there was a snake spotted down there about 400 metres maybe.
21:55Rachel Naylor:Uh-huh. Oh, good. We're not going fully on that track. You'll be relieved, you know.
22:07Thomas Keneally:How do you keep track of the several projects you're working on at once?
22:15Rachel Naylor:Oh, mainly by not doing most of them.
22:21Rachel Naylor:This is a beautiful view. It's of a part of Sydney called Mossman.
22:31Thomas Keneally:You're spoiled for views here, aren't you?
22:36Rachel Naylor:I'm sorry to be always hugging my pants up. I've lost hips recently through not giving nutrition enough space.
22:50Thomas Keneally:How do you find the researching element of writing?
22:55Rachel Naylor:Increasingly, I'm finding the subscriptions and the mechanics of it difficult. but I can get enough to be going on with. I forget code words and all that. I'm a very slow computer user. I can't click away like a young person can. I do like dictating if I can find the right form of it to work with but I haven't succeeded yet. Here's a lovely banksia. Oh yeah. With big banksia nuts on it.
23:45Thomas Keneally:Great. Oh and a big spider.
23:48Rachel Naylor:And a spider. You don't seem very frightenable which is a good thing to be.
23:58Thomas Keneally:I think I've put up a good front.
24:04Thomas Keneally:I remember yesterday you were saying about how you'd had a break from writing. Do you have plans to start again?
24:15Rachel Naylor:I've got plans to start after this, yes. Very soon.
24:23Thomas Keneally:After this? This experience with you. Oh, I'm hindering you starting. I'm supposed to be witnessing the process. We're walking back downhill towards Manly.
24:41Rachel Naylor:Gee, that's a turn up for the books, eh?
24:44Thomas Keneally:Thomas is on the phone to his daughter.
24:46Rachel Naylor:Her coming home today.
24:48Thomas Keneally:Judy's coming home from hospital. It's Thursday, my third and final day with Thomas. I really want to know more about this break he's taken from writing. And I'm outside his place and I've brought some yellow flowers. Hi, I made it. These are for you. Well, and Judy. Thank you. Oh, you're welcome.
25:14Rachel Naylor:You're beautiful. I'm speaking now because Judy is asleep.
25:18Thomas Keneally:Oh, OK. Thanks. We go into the office and shut the door so we don't disturb Judy. OK, sure. And I asked Thomas about his abandoned book.
25:28Rachel Naylor:It's the first time I can remember it happening anyhow. So it was a bit of a crisis. And that's what brought on the great lapse or the great lacuna or the great void in my writing, which I intend to get over Quam Premon as early as possible. Has this been the longest break that you've ever had? Oh, yes. Since I started, yes.
26:11Thomas Keneally:How long has it been?
26:13Rachel Naylor:It's been about three or four months, but things have got done in it. It hasn't even been empty of writing. It's been a slackening, the great slackening at the age of 90. Or is it the great incompetence at the age of 90? We'll find out. And how have you found the great slackening? Miserable. Yes, I've got to get back to writing. To save myself. Oi. Hello.
26:58Thomas Keneally:Hi. Good on you, Jude.
27:01Rachel Naylor:This is Rachel, Jude.
27:02Thomas Keneally:You've gone a long, long way. I really have. But, yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. How are you, Tommy?
27:08Rachel Naylor:I'm OK, Jude. I'm very well. Do you want me to make you a coffee or a tea or anything? I'm OK for now. You had a bit of a sleep. I did. And you're feeling... Feeling very well. Fresh. Yes. Good. Fine. I'll back off now and... See you all. See you all. Can you remember where I was?
27:33Thomas Keneally:How do you think getting older has influenced your writing?
27:38Rachel Naylor:It's very interesting that the experience of writing a novel is the same whether you're 25 or 90. And I'm depending on that proposition to redeem me and save me from myself and get me back into habitual writing.
28:04Rachel Naylor:Very important for me. And if I find that I'm too old, well, I'm too old. But I'd hate not to know.
28:20Rachel Naylor:I must know whether it's so or not. And I'd hate to be, I'd actually hate to be at the end of writing now.
28:33Thomas Keneally:Thomas Ginelli was speaking to me, Rachel Naylor, for the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service.
From the publisher
Rachel Naylor visits the Booker Prize-winning author Thomas Keneally in his home in Sydney, Australia, to see how he writes his latest book. He gives Rachel a tour of his neighbourhood Manly, a seaside suburb in the Northern Beaches, famous for its ferry, surfing and his beloved Sea Eagles, the rugby league team. Rachel accompanies Thomas, known for writing Schindler’s List, on his daily walk around North Head, in Sydney Harbour National Park, taking in the breathtaking views, navigating the swamp and avoiding the spiders. Thomas, who has written more than 50 books, shows Rachel round his library and they discuss ageing, feeling adrift and his first rejection. As he contemplates retirement, he also talks about his recent ill health and how he wants to write the best book written by someone aged over 90.
