Author
Peter Carey
Birth Date
May 7, 1943
(82 Years)
Associated Country
Australia
Peter Carey is an Australian novelist and short story writer widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary writers in English. He was born in Bacchus Marsh and began his career in advertising before turning to fiction. His early short stories, including those in The Fat Man in History, established his reputation for imaginative and unconventional storytelling.
Carey achieved international acclaim with novels such as Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), both of which won the Booker Prize, making him one of the few writers to have received the prize twice. His work often blends historical material with inventive narrative techniques, exploring themes of identity, colonial history, and storytelling itself.
Known for his originality, wit, and stylistic range, Carey has lived and worked in both Australia and the United States. He is widely regarded as a major figure in world literature, celebrated for his bold imagination and narrative innovation.
Carey achieved international acclaim with novels such as Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), both of which won the Booker Prize, making him one of the few writers to have received the prize twice. His work often blends historical material with inventive narrative techniques, exploring themes of identity, colonial history, and storytelling itself.
Known for his originality, wit, and stylistic range, Carey has lived and worked in both Australia and the United States. He is widely regarded as a major figure in world literature, celebrated for his bold imagination and narrative innovation.
Books
Long Way From Home 2018
Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in rural south eastern Australia. Together they embark upon the Redex Trial, a brutal car race around the continent, over roads no...
Amnesia 2015
When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into Australia’s prison computer system, hundreds of asylum-seekers walk free. And because the Americans run the prisons (let’s be honest: as they do in so...
When Catherine Gehrig, a museum conservator in London, falls into grief after her lover’s sudden death, her boss gives her a special project. She will bring back to “life” a nineteenth-century...
Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is an aristocrat born just after the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver. Their lives are...
His Illegal Self 2009
Seven-year-old Che Selkirk was raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. The son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties, Che has grown up with the hope that one...
Theft 2007
Michael "Butcher" Boone is an ex-“really famous" painter, now reduced to living in a remote country house and acting as caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh. Alone together they've forged a...
Wrong About Japan 2006
When Peter Carey offered to take his son to Japan, 12-year-old Charley stipulated no temples or museums. He wanted to see manga, anime,and cool, weird stuff. His father said yes. Out of that bargain...
My Life as a Fake 2005
In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting...
Here are societies in which people gamble for new bodies in a genetic lottery or watch apprehensively as first buildings, then parts of the landscape, and eventually their neighbours, begin to...
In *True History of the Kelly Gang*, the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the...
30 Days in Sydney 2001
After living abroad for years, novelist Peter Carey returns home to Sydney and attempts to capture its character with the help of his old friends, drawing the reader into a wild and wonderful journey...
Jack Maggs 1999
The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal,...
Oscar and Lucinda 1997
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia.
For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for...
Illywhacker 1996
In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious...
Bliss 1996
For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy....
Into that world comes Tristan Smith, a malformed, heroically willful, and unforgivingly observant child. Tristan's life includes adventure and loss, political intrigue, and a bizarre stardom in the...
The Tax Inspector 1993
Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling...