| Peter Carey | |
| Honorific Suffix: | AO |
| Birth Name: | Peter Philip Carey |
| Birth Date: | 7 May 1943 |
| Birth Place: | Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia |
| Occupation: | Novelist, creative writing teacher |
| Period: | 1974–present |
| Signature: | Peter Carey signature (cropped).jpg |
| Notableworks: | Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang |
Peter Philip Carey AO (born 7 May 1943) is an Australian novelist.
He is one of only five writers to have won the Booker Prize twice—the others being J. G. Farrell, J. M. Coetzee, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.[1] Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988, for Oscar and Lucinda, and won his second Booker Prize in 2001, for True History of the Kelly Gang.[2] In May 2008, he was nominated for the Best of the Booker Prize.[3]
Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times, and is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[4]
In addition to writing fiction, he collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders and was, for nineteen years, executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.[5]
Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1943. His parents ran a Holden dealership, Carey Motors. He attended Bacchus Marsh State School from 1948 to 1953, then boarded at Geelong Grammar School between 1954 and 1960. In 1961, Carey enrolled in a science degree at the new Monash University in Melbourne, majoring in chemistry and zoology, but cut his studies short because of a car accident and a lack of interest. It was at university that he met his first wife, Leigh Weetman, who was studying German and philosophy, and who also dropped out.[6]
In 1962, he began to work in advertising. He was employed by various Melbourne agencies between 1962 and 1967, including on campaigns for Volkswagen and Lindeman's Wine.[7] His advertising work brought him into contact with older writers who introduced him to recent European and American fiction: "I didn't really start getting an education until I worked in advertising with people like Barry Oakley and Morris Lurie—and Bruce Petty had an office next door."[8]
During this time, he read widely, particularly the works of Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Gabriel García Márquez, and began writing on his own, receiving his first rejection slip in 1964, the same year he married Weetman.[9] Over the next few years he wrote five novels—Contacts (1964–1965), Starts Here, Ends Here (1965–1967), The Futility Machine (1966–1967), Wog (1969), and Adventures on Board the Marie [sic] Celeste (1971). None of them were published. Sun Books accepted The Futility Machine but did not proceed with publication, and Adventures on Board the Marie Celeste was accepted by Outback Press before being withdrawn by Carey himself.[10] These and other unpublished manuscripts from the period—including twenty-one short stories—are now held by the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland.[11]
Carey's only publications during the 1960s were "Contacts" (a short extract from the unpublished novel of the same name, in Under Twenty-Five: An Anthology, 1966) and "She Wakes" (a short story, in Australian Letters, 1967). Towards the end of the decade, Carey and Weetman abandoned Australia with "a certain degree of self-hatred",[12] travelling through Europe and Iran before settling in London in 1968, where Carey continued to write highly regarded advertising copy and unpublished fiction.
Returning to Australia in 1970, Carey once again did advertising work in Melbourne and Sydney. He also kept writing, and gradually broke through with editors, publishing short stories in magazines and newspapers such as Meanjin and Nation Review. Most of these were collected in his first book, The Fat Man in History, which appeared in 1974. In the same year, Carey moved to Balmain in Sydney to work for Grey Advertising.
In 1976, Carey moved to Queensland and joined an alternative community named Starlight in Yandina, north of Brisbane, with his new partner, the painter Margot Hutcheson, with whom he lived in the 1970s and 1980s. He remained with Grey, writing in Yandina for three weeks, then spending the fourth week at the agency in Sydney. It was during this time that he produced most of the stories collected in War Crimes (1979), as well as Bliss (1981), his first published novel.[13]
Carey started his own advertising agency in 1980, the Sydney-based McSpedden Carey Advertising Consultants, in partnership with Bani McSpedden. After many years of separation, Leigh Weetman asked for a divorce in 1980 so that she could remarry and Peter agreed. In 1981, he moved to Bellingen in northern New South Wales. There he wrote Illywhacker, published in 1985.[14] In the same year he married theatre director Alison Summers. Illusion, a stage musical Carey wrote with Mike Mullins and composer Martin Armiger, was performed at the 1986 Adelaide Festival of the Arts and a studio cast recording of the musical was nominated for a 1987 ARIA Award (for which Carey as lyricist was nominated).[15] [16]
The decade—and the Australian phase of Carey's career—culminated with the publication of Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which won the Booker McConnell Prize (as it was then known) and brought the author international recognition. Carey explained that the novel was inspired, in part, by his time in Bellingen:
Carey sold his share of McSpedden Carey and in 1990 moved with Alison Summers and their son to New York, where he took a job teaching creative writing at New York University. He later said that New York would not have been his first choice of place to live, and that moving there was his wife's idea.[17] Carey and Summers divorced in 2005 after a four-year separation.[18] Carey is now married to the British-born publisher Frances Coady.[19] [20] [21]
The Tax Inspector (1991), begun in Australia, was the first book he completed in the United States. It was followed by The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), a fable in which he explored the relationship between Australia and America, disguised in the novel as "Efica" and "Voorstand". This is a relationship that has preoccupied him throughout his career, going back to Bliss (1981), Illywhacker (1985), and the early short stories. Nevertheless, Carey continued to set his fiction primarily in Australia and remained diffident about writing explicitly on American themes. In a piece on True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), Mel Gussow reported that:
It was only after nearly two decades in the United States that he embarked on Parrot and Olivier in America (2010), loosely based on events in the life of Alexis de Tocqueville. Carey says "Tocqueville opened a door I could enter. I saw the present in the past. It was accessible, imaginable."[22] Carey continues to extend his canvas; in his novel, The Chemistry of Tears (2012), "contemporary London is brought intimately in touch with ... a 19th-century Germany redolent of the Brothers Grimm".[23]
In 1998, Carey was accused of snubbing Queen Elizabeth II by declining an invitation to meet her after winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Jack Maggs (1997). While Carey is a republican, in the Australian sense, he insists that no offence was intended:
The meeting did eventually take place, with the Queen remarking, according to Carey, "I believe you had a little trouble getting here."[24]
The unhappy circumstances of Carey's breakup with Alison Summers received publicity (largely in Australia) in 2006 when appeared, depicting the toxic relationship between its protagonist, Butcher Bones, and his ex-wife, known only as "the Plaintiff".[25]
In April 2015 he, alongside Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, withdrew as table hosts from the PEN American Center gala in which the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was to be awarded a "Freedom of Expression Courage" award.[26] Carey, a former Vice President of PEN, was one of 204 PEN[27] members who signed a letter stating that …An expression of views, however disagreeable, is certainly not to be answered by violence or murder. However, there is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression. Writers including John Berger, Deborah Eisenberg, Eve Ensler and Keith Gessen all[28] abhorred the murders while objecting to the PEN executive's unilateral decision to give the award.
Carey has been awarded three honorary degrees.[29] He has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1989), an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2001),[30] a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003),[31] and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2016),[32] which has also awarded him its Harold D Vursell Memorial Award (2012).[33] [34] In 2010, he appeared on two Australian postage stamps in a series dedicated to "Australian Legends".[35] On 11 June 2012, Carey was named an Officer of the Order of Australia for "distinguished service to literature as a novelist, through international promotion of the Australian identity, as a mentor to emerging writers."[36] And in 2014, Carey was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by Sydney University.[37] In 2021, Carey was named by Carnegie Corporation of New York as an honoree of the Great Immigrants Award.[38] [39]
Carey has won numerous literary awards, including:
The ARIA Music Awards is an annual awards ceremony that recognises excellence, innovation, and achievement across all genres of Australian music. They commenced in 1987. ! |-| 1987| Illusion (with Martin Armiger)|rowspan="2" | Best Original Soundtrack, Cast or Show Album| |rowspan="2" | [40] |-| 2015| Bliss (with Opera Australia)| |-
Stories from Carey's first two collections have been repackaged in The Fat Man in History and Other Stories (1980), Exotic Pleasures (1990), and Collected Stories (1994); the last also includes three previously uncollected stories: "Joe" (Australian New Writing, 1973), "A Million Dollars Worth of Amphetamines" (Nation Review, 1975), and "Concerning the Greek Tyrant" (The Tabloid Story Pocket Book, 1978).