Peter Carey

Peter Carey is an Australian novelist who has won the Booker Prize twice, blending fabulation, history, and dark comedy into an unmistakable vision of Australian identity.

Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and has lived in New York for decades, yet his imagination has never really left Australia. He is one of only five authors to have won the Booker Prize twice — for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) — and his career stands as one of the great achievements in contemporary fiction in English. He began as a writer of extravagant short stories in the 1970s, marked by a surrealist bent and a delight in fabulation that never entirely left his longer work, and his novels have always moved between historical grounding and something wilder and more inventive.

Oscar and Lucinda is a Victorian epic in the broadest sense: an English clergyman with a gambling addiction and an Australian heiress who manufactures glass share a consuming obsession that binds them together across continents and ultimately destroys them. The novel is funny, strange, and formally ambitious, built around the bet that will define both their lives — to transport a glass church through the Australian wilderness — and Carey’s control of its historical texture and emotional scale is remarkable. True History of the Kelly Gang takes an entirely different approach, narrating the life of the outlaw Ned Kelly — whose iron armour has become one of Australia’s most potent cultural symbols — in Kelly’s own invented voice, a stream of unpunctuated vernacular that manages to be both formally experimental and gripping as pure story.

Earlier novels including Illywhacker (1985), a sprawling, cheerfully mendacious account of Australian history told by a 139-year-old con man, and Jack Maggs (1997), a reimagining of Great Expectations from the transported convict’s point of view, confirm that Carey’s deepest subject is Australia itself — its colonial origins, its myths of self-invention, and the question of what kind of civilization was built in the space cleared by dispossession. He writes with an exuberance and a darkness that are entirely his own.