2025 PROGRAM
Thomas Keneally Oration
DATE:
Thursday 19 March, 2026
LOCATION:
Manly Wharf Events (formerly Sake)
COST:
$75.00
The Thomas Keneally Oration is the Manly Writers’ Festival’s annual keynote address, created to honour one of Australia’s most significant literary voices and his enduring contribution to public life.
In 2026, the Oration will be delivered by Thomas Keneally himself. Across a
career spanning more than six decades, Keneally has written with moral clarity about history, power, injustice, faith and national identity, helping to shape how Australians understand both their past and their place in the world.
In this special address, Keneally reflects on writing as a civic act: the
responsibility to bear witness, the role of memory in national storytelling, and the
power of literature to question, challenge, and endure. Drawing on a lifetime of work across fiction, history and memoir, the Oration speaks to the moment we are in now, and to the long view writers must take.
The Thomas Keneally Oration opens the Manly Writers’ Festival, setting the tone for the days that follow with stories across Manly.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY
The Manly Writers' Festival acknowledges and thanks the original storytellers on the lands on which our events take place, the Gameraygal people of the Eora Nation. We acknowledge and respect their continuing connection and culture, and we pay our respects to ancestors and Elders, past and present, as well as emerging leaders.