Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is the writer Thomas Canile. As a novelist he's been telling stories for over four decades.

With more than 30 titles to his credit, he's one of our most distinguished authors.

In 1982, his fame spread beyond his homeland of Australia when he won the Booker Prize with his historical novel Schindler's Arc.

It was made into the landmark movie Schindler's List, and for many the extraordinary true story of one man risking his life and losing

his fortune to save more than a thousand Jews was a uniquely powerful way of

understanding the horrors of the Holocaust. Religion and war have been themes throughout much of his work and

indeed his own life. Growing up, his father's absence during the Second World War,

helped to create a serious-minded child who latterly trained for the priesthood. But after six years in the

seminary and just weeks before his ordination, he quit coming to regard the church as a cold and

largely self-interested corporate institution.

Thomas Canelie, there is so much more than just Schindler's Arc to talk about, but let's start

there.

It's a good place to start.

At the moment when you won the Booker Prize, what went through your mind?

Well, I felt stunned by a cattle prod, but a delightful cattle prod. I was delighted that it happened except that I'd drunk my

publishers Coniac as well as my own because I was convinced I had no chance because of the nature of the book.

When I received the booker, I thank them for their recklessness.

You say the nature of the book, there had been a great deal of quite heated debate about

whether or not it qualified as a novel because it was based on such concrete historical fact.

Yes, and indeed the characters in the book except for Oscar himself who were deceased.

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