Peter Carey
Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh in 1943, and educated at Geelong Grammar before enrolling in science at Monash University. He supported his early literary career by writing advertising copy - in Melbourne, Sydney and London - right through to the late 1980s when he published Oscar and Lucinda (1988). His literary talent has been recognised with a formidable arsenal of literary awards.
Carey's first success came with Fat Man in History, a collection of short stories published in 1974, and then War Crimes, which gained him the Miles Franklin in 1979. He published Bliss in 1981, for which he won the Miles Franklin Award, the National Book Council Award and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award, and this novel, like his Oscar and Lucinda, made the transition from the printed page to the screen. His off-beat Illywacker (1985) was also a prize-winner, seeing him take out the Book Council Award, the Age Book of the Year Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. It also won the Ditmar Award for Best Australian Science Fiction and was short-listed for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel - although not by any stretch of the imagination is it a conventional work of science fiction or fantasy. Illywacker was also short-listed for the Booker Prize, which Carey won in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. Only one other writer worldwide has been twice the recipient of the prestigious Booker Prize. Carey has also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize twice, first for Jack Maggs (1997) and then for True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). His most recent novel is Parrot and Olivier in America, released in Australia in late 2009 and elsewhere in early 2010.
To be on an Australian stamp is really quite moving. There's a big part of me that really wants to be part of Australian culture
Peter Carey has a distinctive authorial voice, with a blend of realism and surrealism that attracts not only awards but also a loyal readership. His idiosyncratic novels are peopled by often-ambiguous narrators, suggesting the unstable ground on which our understandings of the world and re-imaginings of the past are based. In 2004 the Australian newspaper listed Peter Carey as one of the 40 most influential Australians.
Besides being a novelist, Carey co-wrote the screenplay for Bliss and wrote the screenplay for Wim Wenders' highly regarded Until the End of the World. Since 1990 Carey has lived in New York, where he has taught creative writing at New York University, Princeton, Columbia, Barnard College and now Hunter College, where he is director of the MFA in creative writing. He is an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.
