LIT LISTS: Four books that changed Meg Keneally

Meg Keneally started her working life as a junior public affairs officer at the Australian Consulate-General in New York, before moving to Dublin to work as a sub-editor and freelance features writer. On returning to Australia, she joined the Daily Telegraph as a general news reporter, founded a public relations company, and has worked in corporate affairs. With her father Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s List) she is the author of the novels The Soldier's Curse and The Unmourned.

One of four books that changed Keneally the younger, as shared at the Sydney Morning Herald:

THE HANDMAID'S TALE
Margaret Atwood

When I read The Handmaid's Tale, I had just done Nineteen Eighty-Four for the HSC. While I'd loved it and was in a dystopian frame of mind, Atwood hit closer to home. I'd had a reasonably sheltered childhood so the concept of women's bodies being used in this way, and their individuality being discarded, was seismic. Atwood wrote with such authority that the book had all the immediacy of a news report.