in Tasmania, a land whose aboriginal culture had been experiencing brutal destruction at the hands of British settlers and convicts. The novel is told by more than 20 voices. It won the 2000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Australian Miles Franklin Award. In translation the book won France's Relay Prix d'Evasion. Interviewed in 2001, Kneale said that J. G. Farrell was a writer whom he particularly admired, as one who "wrote about the British Empire – and scathingly – back in the 1970s, when few in Britain wanted to think about the uglier parts of their country's past." Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance is a volume of 12 short stories set around the world, from Colombia to London to Africa. They examine the lives of people as they struggled to survive and do the right thing, sometimes managing neither. One of the stories, "Powder", about a failed lawyer whose life changes when he chances upon a stash of cocaine and a mobile phone, was made into the French feature film, Une Pure Affaire. When We Were Romans is told from the point of view of a boy, Laurence, whose mother suddenly and unexpectedly decides that she and her children, and even Laurence's hamster, must flee England to Rome, where she lived many years before. An Atheist's History of Belief is Kneale's first nonfiction book. It looks at the beliefs that people have devised to explain their world, from earliest prehistoric times to the present, as understood by a fascinated non-believer. His second work of nonfiction, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings is a social and cultural history spanning centuries. Pilgrims is a comic novel set in medieval times, mainly in 1289, about a group of heterogeneous individuals who band together on a journey from England to Rome on a religious pilgrimage, each with his or her own intentions. Works Fiction Whore Banquets, 1987 Inside Rose's Kingdom, 1989 Sweet Thames, 1992 English Passengers, 2000 Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance, 2005 Powder, 2006 When We Were Romans, 2007 Pilgrims, 2020 Non-fiction An Atheist's History of Belief, 2013 Rome: A History in Seven Sackings, 2017 References External links How religion accidentally inspired some of our greatest technological breakthroughs Matthew Kneale, "Pope Francis's drive to cleanse the Catholic Church", New Statesman, 24 October 2013. 1960 births Living people 20th-century