life

07/10/2013 Video

Thomas Keneally

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

– Thomas Keneally

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born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia,  October 07, 1935

gender: male
Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright and author of non-fiction. He is best known for writing Schindler’s Ark, the Booker Prize winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. The book would later be adapted to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Life and career

Born in Sydney, Keneally was educated at St Patrick’s College, Strathfield, where a writing prize was named after him. He entered St Patrick’s Seminary, Manly to train as a Catholic priest but left before his ordination. He worked as a Sydney schoolteacher before his success as a novelist, and he was a lecturer at the University of New England (1968–70). He has also written screenplays, memoirs and non-fiction books.

Keneally was known as “Mick” until 1964 but began using the name Thomas when he started publishing, after advice from his publisher to use what was really his first name. He is most famous for his Schindler’s Ark (1982) (later republished as Schindler’s List), which won the Booker Prize and is the basis of the film Schindler’s List. Many of his novels are reworkings of historical material, although modern in their psychology and style.

Keneally has also acted in a handful of films. He had a small role in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (based on his novel) and played Father Marshall in the Fred Schepisi movie, The Devil’s Playground (1976) (not to be confused with a similarly-titled documentary by Lucy Walker about the Amish rite of passage called rumspringa).

In 1983 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). He is an Australian Living Treasure.

He is a strong advocate of the Australian republic, meaning the severing of all ties with the British monarchy, and published a book on the subject Our Republic in 1993. Several of his Republican essays appear on the web site of the Australian Republican Movement.

Keneally is a keen supporter of rugby league football, in particular the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles club of the NRL. He made an appearance in the 2007 rugby league drama film The Final Winter.

In March 2009, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, gave an autographed copy of Keneally’s Lincoln biography to President Barack Obama as a state gift.

Most recently Thomas Keneally featured as a writer in the critically acclaimed Australian drama, “Our Sunburnt Country”.

Thomas Keneally’s nephew Ben is married to the former NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally.

05/10/2013 Quote

Dog

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When God had made the earth and sky,
The flowers and the trees.

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He then made all the animals,
The fish, the birds and bees.

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And when at last He’d finished,
Not one was quite the same.
He said, “I’ll walk this world of mine,
And give each one a name.”
And so He traveled far and wide

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And everywhere He went,
A little creature followed Him
Until its strength was spent.
When all were named upon the earth
And in the sky and sea,

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The little creature said, “Dear Lord,
There’s not one left for me.”
Kindly the Father said to him,
“I’ve left you to the end.
I’ve turned my own name back to front
And called you dog, my friend.”

~ Author Unknown ~

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28/09/2013 Quote

Confucius

Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.

– Confucius

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born in Qufu, China

gender: male
genre: Philosophy
influences: Zhou Era Chinese Thought
Confucius was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher, whose teachings and philosophy have deeply influenced Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese thought and life.孔子 – Kong Zi
孔夫子 – Kong Fuzi (Kung Fu-Tzu)

His family was poor and in his youth he tended livestock but in later years, he had many disciples and served for a time as the Minister of Crime.

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15321.Confucius

27/09/2013 Quote

Kay Ryan

It isn’t ever delicate to live.

– Kay Ryan

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born in San Jose, California, The United States,  September 27, 1945

gender: female

genre: Poetry

Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000). Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Ryan’s tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore; however, Ryan’s often barbed wit and unique facility with “recombinant” rhyme has earned her the status of one of the great living American poets, and led to her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008. She held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges like the one in Marin County, California where she and her partner Carol Adair taught for over thirty years. In an interview with the Washington City Paper at the end of tenure, Ryan called herself a “whistle-blower” who “advocated for much underpraised and underfunded community colleges across the nation.”

Ryan’s surprising laureateship capped years of outsider-status in the poetry world. Her quizzical, philosophical, often mordant poetry is a product of years of thought. Ryan has said that her poems do not start with imagery or sound, but rather develop “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” Critic Meghan O’Rourke has written of her work: “Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them.” “Sharks’ Teeth” displays that meandering approach to her subject matter, which, Ryan says, “gives my poems a coolness. I can touch things that are very hot because I’ve given them some distance.”

Kay Ryan is the recipient of several major awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has received the Union League Poetry Prize and the Maurice English Poetry Award, as well as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Since 2006 she has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

26/09/2013 Quote

Jane Smiley

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

– Jane Smiley

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born in Los Angeles, California, The United States,  September 26, 1949

gender: female

Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a A.B. at Vassar College, then earned a M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996, she taught at Iowa State University. Smiley published her first novel,Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story “Lily”, which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare’s King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster’s seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan’s Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.

In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
25/09/2013 Quote

Shel Silverstein

Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.

– Shel Silverstein

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born in Chicago, IL, The United States,  September 25, 1930

 

died: May 10, 1999
gender: male
Shel Silverstein was the author-artist of many beloved books of prose and poetry. He was a cartoonist, playwright, poet, performer, recording artist, and Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated songwriter.