Happy birthday, writer Thomas Keneally

It is the birthday of Australian writer Thomas Keneally (1935), who won the British Booker Prize for his novel Schindler's Ark (1982), based on the work of German industrialist Oskar Schindler saving the lives of 1,200 Jews from extermination during World War II. The book was adapted as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), which was named best picture and received six other Oscars. Holocaust survivor Poldek Pfefferberg, who was saved by Schindler, inspired Keneally to write the book.

Happy birthday, writer William Golding

It is the birthday of English writer William Golding (1911), who is best remembered for his widely heralded novel Lord of the Flies (1954), the story of a group of British boys marooned on an uninhabited island. Golding won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He also won the British Man Booker Prize in literature for Rites of Passage (1980), the first of his To the Ends of the Earth sea trilogy about a troubled British warship.