A short life of the author
Peter Carey (b. 7 May 1943) is Australia’s most internationally celebrated novelist and one of only four writers to win the Booker Prize twice (alongside Hilary Mantel, J.M. Coetzee, and Margaret Atwood). His fiction reimagines Australian history — its convict origins, its bush mythology, its colonial violence, its peculiar relationship to England and to the landscape — with an exuberance, an inventiveness, and a moral seriousness that have made him the defining literary voice of modern Australia. From the hallucinatory satire of Bliss (1981) to the 600-page lies of Illywhacker (1985) to the furious, ungrammatical voice of Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), Carey has demonstrated a range and ambition that places him alongside Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez in the tradition of postcolonial novelists who have reinvented the English-language novel.
Life and Career
Carey was born on 7 May 1943 in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, a small town west of Melbourne. He attended Geelong Grammar School (the same school that produced Rupert Murdoch) and then studied chemistry briefly at Monash University before dropping out to enter the advertising industry. He worked as a copywriter in Melbourne and London for nearly two decades — an experience that gave him both financial stability and an insider’s understanding of the language of persuasion, performance, and imposture that pervades his fiction.
His early short stories — collected in The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979) — are dark, surreal, Kafkaesque fables that established his reputation in Australia. Bliss (1981) — about Harry Joy, an advertising executive who suffers a heart attack, dies, is resurrected, and gradually discovers that his ordinary suburban life is actually Hell — was his debut novel: a savage, hallucinatory satire of Australian materialism that won the Miles Franklin Award and the National Book Council Award.
Illywhacker (1985) — narrated by Herbert Badgery, a 139-year-old liar, con man, and aviator who tells the story of three generations of his family and, through them, the story of Australia itself — is a 600-page picaresque of extraordinary energy and invention. The title is Australian slang for a confidence trickster, and the novel’s central argument is that Australia is a nation founded on lies — colonial lies, convict lies, bush lies, commercial lies — and that these lies are both the source of its vitality and the mechanism of its self-deception. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Oscar and Lucinda (1988) — about Oscar Hopkins, a clergyman obsessed with gambling, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a glass manufacturer and heiress, who meet on a ship to Australia and wager on transporting a glass church through the New South Wales wilderness — won the Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 1997 film starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett. The novel combines Victorian panoramic ambition with a postcolonial sensibility, reimagining the settlement of Australia as a grand, doomed, absurdly beautiful enterprise.
Jack Maggs (1997) — a reimagining of Dickens’s Great Expectations from the convict Magwitch’s perspective, in which the returned convict is the hero and the English writer (a Dickens figure called Tobias Oates) is the villain — is his most explicit postcolonial statement: a novel that reclaims the Australian narrative from the English literary tradition that colonised it.
True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) — narrated in Ned Kelly’s voice, a furious, unpunctuated, semi-literate first person that draws on the real Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter — won the Booker again and is his most widely admired novel. It transforms the bushranger into Australia’s founding mythological figure: a working-class Irish-Australian rebel whose story encompasses the violence of colonial authority, the solidarity of the dispossessed, and the making of a national identity through resistance and defeat.
Later novels — My Life as a Fake (2003), Theft: A Love Story (2006), His Illegal Self (2008), Parrot and Olivier in America (2010, Booker-shortlisted), The Chemistry of Tears (2012), Amnesia (2014), A Long Way from Home (2017) — continued his reimagining of Australian identity with undiminished invention.
Carey moved to New York in 1990 and taught at New York University and Hunter College. He lives in Manhattan.
Major Works and Themes
Carey writes about Australia as a place of imposture, reinvention, and colonial violence — a nation whose founding myths (the bush, the outlaw, the convict, the honest battler) are simultaneously the source of its identity and the mechanism by which it conceals the violence of its origins. His fiction is exuberant, comic, formally inventive, and deeply engaged with the question of who gets to tell Australia’s story.
His prose is characterised by its energy and variety — he is equally at home in the picaresque exuberance of Illywhacker, the restrained Victorian pastiche of Oscar and Lucinda, the raw vernacular fury of True History of the Kelly Gang, and the cool postmodern gamesmanship of Jack Maggs. Few novelists of his generation have demonstrated such range.
Key Works
- Bliss (1981)
- Illywhacker (1985)
- Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
- Jack Maggs (1997)
- True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)
- Parrot and Olivier in America (2010)
Collecting Carey
Peter Carey’s collecting market is divided between Australian first editions (University of Queensland Press, later Random House Australia) and international first editions (Faber and Faber UK, Knopf US).
Australian first editions are the true firsts and are preferred by serious collectors. Bliss (1981, University of Queensland Press) brings $100–$400 in fine condition with jacket. Illywhacker (1985, UQP) brings $50–$200.
Oscar and Lucinda (1988, UQP) — the first Booker winner — brings $50–$200 for Australian firsts, less for Faber UK editions. True History of the Kelly Gang (2001, UQP) — the second Booker winner — brings $40–$100.
UK first editions (Faber and Faber) are more widely available and bring somewhat lower prices. US first editions (Knopf) are the most affordable. Carey signs at events and book festivals, and signed copies are obtainable for most titles.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Long Way from Home Carey's road-race novel — a suburban couple enters a 1950s car race around Australia and accidentally discovers a family secret connected to the Stolen Generations, the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families, a novel about race, identity, and the lies that make white Australian life possible. | 2017 | Penguin Books Australia | English |
| Amnesia Carey's cyber-thriller — a young Australian woman releases a computer worm that opens every electronic prison door in Australia, and a disgraced journalist must uncover her motives, a novel about surveillance, sovereignty, and the long history of American interference in Australian politics. | 2014 | Penguin Books Australia | English |
| Bliss Peter Carey's debut novel — an Australian advertising executive dies of a heart attack, is revived, and finds that the world he returns to is literally Hell, a satirical fable about consumer capitalism, environmental destruction, and the possibility of redemption through storytelling. | 1981 | University of Queensland Press | English |
| His Illegal Self Carey's 1970s radical novel — a sheltered boy from a wealthy New York family is snatched by a young woman he believes is his fugitive mother and taken to a hippie commune in the Australian rainforest, a story about identity, deception, and the wreckage of the counterculture. | 2008 | Random House Australia | English |
| Illywhacker Carey's sprawling picaresque — narrated by a 139-year-old liar, conman, and aviator, the novel spans the entire twentieth century of Australian history through three generations of a family of hustlers, dreamers, and self-inventors, the word 'illywhacker' being Australian slang for a confidence trickster. | 1985 | University of Queensland Press | English |
| Jack Maggs Carey's postcolonial rewriting of Great Expectations — an Australian convict returns illegally to London to find the young gentleman he has been secretly financing, but is intercepted by a young novelist who wants to use his story, a novel about who owns a convict's narrative: the convict or the empire that created him. | 1997 | University of Queensland Press | English |
| My Life as a Fake Carey's literary hoax novel — inspired by the Ern Malley affair (Australia's most famous literary hoax), a fabricated poet escapes the control of his creators and takes on a life of his own, a novel about the relationship between authenticity and invention in art. | 2003 | Random House Australia | English |
| Oscar and Lucinda Carey's Booker Prize winner — two compulsive gamblers in nineteenth-century Australia make a wager to transport a glass church through the wilderness of New South Wales, a novel about faith, obsession, colonialism, and the madness of grand gestures in a landscape that punishes them. | 1988 | University of Queensland Press | English |
| Parrot and Olivier in America Carey's reimagining of Tocqueville's journey to America — a French aristocrat and his English servant travel through Jacksonian America, each narrating his own version of the journey, a novel about democracy, class, and the stories that nations tell about themselves. | 2009 | Random House Australia | English |
| The Chemistry of Tears Carey's mechanical automaton novel — a grieving museum conservator is assigned to restore a nineteenth-century mechanical swan, and the history of the automaton's creation becomes entangled with her own loss, a dual-timeline novel about grief, craftsmanship, and the desire to animate the inanimate. | 2012 | Penguin Books Australia | English |
| The Tax Inspector Carey's dark family saga — a tax inspector arrives to audit a failing car dealership in suburban Sydney and uncovers a family rotten with abuse, fraud, and delusion, a Gothic novel set in the fluorescent-lit world of Australian car sales. | 1991 | University of Queensland Press | English |
| Theft Carey's art-world novel — narrated alternately by a failed Australian painter and his brain-damaged brother, a story about art forgery, authentication, and the question of what gives a painting its value: the hand that made it or the name attached to it. | 2006 | Random House Australia | English |
| True History of the Kelly Gang Carey's second Booker Prize winner — the story of the bushranger Ned Kelly told in Kelly's own (invented) voice, a novel written as a series of letters from Kelly to his unborn daughter, in an unpunctuated prose that captures the rhythms of Australian vernacular speech and transforms an outlaw into a literary hero. | 2000 | University of Queensland Press | English |