Thomas Keneally: ‘Does anyone write a good book at 83? Well, I think I have’’

The Australian novelist on crying over a Dickens biography, laughing at Kathy Lette and the classic he is ashamed not to have read

The book I am currently reading
The Barbara Kingsolver novel Unsheltered. Not quite up there with The Poisonwood Bibleand Flight Behaviour, but still a magnificent novel.

The book that changed my life
Nobel prize-winning Australian novelist Patrick White’s Voss. It is a sweeping and eccentric book, a modernist classic (Thomas Mann eat your heart out), and it showed me that Australians were just as entitled to write novels as anyone.

I couldn't finish Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. OK, guv, I’m ready to wear the vulgarian handcuffs and do my time