Peter Carey | |
|---|---|
| Born | Peter Philip Carey (1943-05-07)7 May 1943 (age 82) Bacchus Marsh,Victoria, Australia |
| Occupation | Novelist, creative writing teacher |
| Period | 1974–present |
| Notable works | True History of the Kelly Gang, Oscar and Lucinda, Bliss |
| Notable awards | Booker Prize 1988, 2001 |
| Signature | |
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Peter Philip Carey (born 7 May 1943) is an Australian novelist who has lived in New York City for more than three decades.
He is one of only five writers to have won theBooker Prize twice—the others beingJ. G. Farrell,J. M. Coetzee,Hilary Mantel andMargaret Atwood.[1] Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988, forOscar and Lucinda, and won his second Booker Prize in 2001, forTrue History of the Kelly Gang.[2] In May 2008, he was nominated for theBest of the Booker Prize.[3]
Carey has won theMiles Franklin Award three times, and is frequently named as Australia's next contender for theNobel Prize in Literature.[4]
In addition to writing fiction, he collaborated on the screenplay of the filmUntil the End of the World withWim Wenders and was, for nineteen years, executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program atHunter College, part of theCity University of New York.[5]
Peter Carey was born inBacchus Marsh,Victoria, in 1943. His parents ran aHolden dealership, Carey Motors. He attended Bacchus Marsh State School from 1948 to 1953, then boarded atGeelong Grammar School between 1954 and 1960. In 1961, Carey enrolled in a science degree at the newMonash 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 forVolkswagen andLindeman'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 likeBarry Oakley andMorris Lurie—andBruce Petty had an office next door."[8]
During this time, he read widely, particularly the works ofSamuel Beckett,William Faulkner,James Joyce,Franz Kafka, andGabriel 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), andAdventures on Board the Marie [sic]Celeste (1971). None of them were published. Sun Books acceptedThe Futility Machine but did not proceed with publication, andAdventures 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 theUniversity of Queensland.[11]
Carey's only publications during the 1960s were "Contacts" (a short extract from the unpublished novel of the same name, inUnder Twenty-Five: An Anthology, 1966) and "She Wakes" (a short story, inAustralian 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 asMeanjin andNation 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 toBalmain in Sydney to work forGrey Advertising.
In 1976, Carey moved toQueensland and joined an alternative community named Starlight inYandina, north ofBrisbane, with his new partner, the painterMargot 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 inWar Crimes (1979), as well asBliss (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 toBellingen in northernNew South Wales. There he wroteIllywhacker, published in 1985.[14] In the same year he married theatre director Alison Summers.Illusion, a stage musical Carey wrote with Mike Mullins and composerMartin Armiger, was performed at the 1986Adelaide Festival of the Arts and a studio cast recording of the musical was nominated for a 1987ARIA Award (for which Carey as lyricist was nominated).[15][16]
The decade—and the Australian phase of Carey's career—culminated with the publication ofOscar and Lucinda (1988), which won theBooker 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:
I was living in Bellingen in the country. And the little church was down the road, and they wanted to take it away, zip: and I looked at that landscape and I thought – only 200 years ago this was a landscape that was full of Aboriginal stories. So I thought about a moment when that church that I knew, which was being removed from my landscape, might have arrived. I wanted it to arrive intact, whole. And I thought it would come on a barge. And, this is a totally irrational thought, it’s like a dream. I wanted this church, a wooden church, just what I saw, a church in that valley, to come along the Bellingen River on a barge gliding like a dream into the landscape.[17]
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 atNew 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.[18] Carey and Summers divorced in 2005 after a four-year separation.[19] Carey is now married to the British-born publisherFrances Coady.[20][21][22]
The Tax Inspector (1991), begun in Australia, was the first book he completed in the United States. It was followed byThe 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 toBliss (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 onTrue History of the Kelly Gang (2001), Mel Gussow reported that:
Periodically he has thought about writing an American-based novel, and he had started one dealing with litigation. But he put it aside forNed Kelly. Explaining why he continues to set most of his books in Australia, he recalled that one of his students said, "When you change countries you lose your peripheral vision." In that sense, his view of America is still limited. Writing about Australia—its history and its heroes—his perspective is wide and deep.[23]
It was only after nearly two decades in the United States that he embarked onParrot and Olivier in America (2010), loosely based on events in the life ofAlexis de Tocqueville. Carey says "Tocqueville opened a door I could enter. I saw the present in the past. It was accessible, imaginable."[24] 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".[25]
In 1998, Carey was accused of snubbingQueen Elizabeth II by declining an invitation to meet her after winning theCommonwealth Writers Prize forJack Maggs (1997). While Carey is arepublican, in the Australian sense, he insists that no offence was intended:
What happened, he explains, was that he had already been in England recently for a literary festival; he is booked for another trip soon, and had been travelling so much that he asked the prize organisers, "Would it be possible to see Her Majesty when I was actually in London?" "They thought it would be better just to cancel than for me to ask Her Majesty to do that. Then all this stuff started going out in English tabloids."[26]
The meeting did eventually take place, with the Queen remarking, according to Carey, "I believe you had a little trouble getting here."[27]
The unhappy circumstances of Carey's breakup with Alison Summers received publicity (largely in Australia) in 2006 whenTheft: A Love Story appeared, depicting the toxic relationship between its protagonist, Butcher Bones, and his ex-wife, known only as "the Plaintiff".[28]
In April 2015 he, alongsideMichael Ondaatje,Francine Prose,Teju Cole,Rachel Kushner andTaiye Selasi, withdrew as table hosts from thePEN American Center gala in which the French satirical magazineCharlie Hebdo was to be awarded a "Freedom of Expression Courage" award.[29] Carey, a former vice president ofPEN, was one of 204 PEN[30] members who signed aletter 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 includingJohn Berger,Deborah Eisenberg,Eve Ensler andKeith Gessen all[31] abhorred the murders while objecting to the PEN executive's unilateral decision to give the award.
Carey has been awarded three honorary degrees.[32] He has been elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Literature (1989),[33] an Honorary Fellow of theAustralian Academy of the Humanities (2001),[34] a Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003),[35] and a Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters (2016),[36] which has also awarded him its Harold D Vursell Memorial Award (2012).[37][38] In 2010, he appeared on two Australian postage stamps in a series dedicated to "Australian Legends".[39] On 11 June 2012, Carey was named an Officer of theOrder of Australia for "distinguished service to literature as a novelist, through international promotion of the Australian identity, as a mentor to emerging writers."[40] And in 2014, Carey was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by Sydney University.[41] In 2021, Carey was named byCarnegie Corporation of New York as an honoree of theGreat Immigrants Award.[42][43]
Carey has won numerous literary awards, including:
TheARIA Music Awards is an annual awards ceremony that recognises excellence, innovation, and achievement across all genres ofAustralian music. They commenced in 1987.
| Year | Nominee / work | Award | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1987 | Illusion (withMartin Armiger) | Best Original Soundtrack, Cast or Show Album | Nominated | [44] |
| 2015 | Bliss (withOpera Australia) | Nominated |
Stories from Carey's first two collections have been repackaged inThe Fat Man in History and Other Stories (1980),Exotic Pleasures (1990), andCollected 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).
