NEW HIRE: After rejecting the offer three...

NEW HIRE: After rejecting the offer three times, prize-winning Australian novelist Thomas M. Keneally has finally accepted an appointment as professor of English and comparative literature at UCI. . . . Keneally first gained international acclaim with his 1982 book “Schindler’s List,” about a German Catholic industrialist who recruited prison camp labor in Poland during World War II but spared 1,300 Jews. “I write a lot about human turpitude and malice,” he said from Sydney. “But it is not the malice that surprises me. It is the sudden and irrational grandeur of people.”