Thomas Keneally, author of the book on which Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning Schindler's List was based, once asked the famed director for a minor role in the movie, but was turned down.

The good-humored, plump and bald writer is an amateur actor who has done bit roles in movies.

"I was never the good-looking guy, so I only played small roles," he said at the recently concluded Shanghai International Literary Festival. Keneally wanted to play one of the prisoners in the concentration camp, but Spielberg said he wanted a "real actor" for the role.

Author of Schindler's Ark, A Dutiful Daughter and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Keneally is one of 10 authors included in the Australian government's latest initiative to introduce its literature to Chinese readers.

Keneally, 75, is a multi-award winning novelist, playwright and non-fiction writer. His most acclaimed creation, Schindler's Ark, won the Booker Prize in 1982 and was later adapted into Spielberg's Schindler's List that won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Picture.

Keneally was trained to be a Catholic priest but left before ordination, and worked as a schoolteacher before achieving success as a novelist.

"When I started out to be a writer in the 1960s, there was some skepticism about it," he says. "Australia produced fine wool, but writing was not part of our job description. It was as possible for an Australian to write a novel as (for) a dog to ride a bicycle," he says.

As a writer, Keneally has always been interested in marginal groups and people in confinement - such as concentration camp prisoners, aboriginal Australians denied civil rights till the late 1960s, and early Chinese immigrants in the United States.

A few years ago he even considered making a documentary on Chinese immigrants in California - gold miners who arrived in the 19th century to try their luck in the US.

Keneally is also interested in flawed personalities. "I always tend to put weak human beings, caught in a period of unfolding history, and see how they would behave under pressure," he says.

His characters include a woman who loses her children, a man who becomes involved in a civil war in Africa, and an Australian convict, besides the flawed hero, Oscar Schindler.

Shanghai Translation Publishing House recently published Three Cheers for the Paraclete, one of his early books written in the 1960s.

Keneally relates the book, about Catholic priests and their hypocrisies, to his early experience studying in a Catholic school.

"I began to have an appetite for contradictions in characters - people who are cruel in one area and kind in another, a gentle woman who is a tiger at the same time.

"We all want to live with people who are reliable, sane and virtuous, but when we read we want to read about contradictory figures," he says.