An Australian short story writer and novelist, Peter Carey is renown for breaking the rules with his sensibility and style which has a lightly ironic touch. Peter Carey once said, “Almost everything I have ever written has been concerned with questions of ‘national identity', a seemingly old-fashioned project that seems, to me, an alarmingly modern concern.” The judges awarding the Commonwealth Writers' Prize to Jack Maggs said, “The themes of colonial self-denial and the search for the recovery of the original self are here…in a narrative that forces us to reflect on the meaning of history.”
Carey's novels frequently display the post-modernistic characteristics of self-consciousness and reflexivity (work that refers to itself), discontinuity and indeterminacy (time that is mixed up with no beginning, middle or end), intertextuality, decentring, pluralities and simulacra and juxta-positioning of the mundane real and the unreal, but it is all done with great economy of effort and stylistic simplicity.
Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1943. He attended school at Geelong Grammar School before attending Monash University where he failed a science degree. Since leaving university he has worked as an advertising copywriter for Volkswagen in Melbourne, Sydney and London, and an academic teaching Creative Writing at New York University. Carey has also lived in an ‘alternative' community at Yandina in the rainforest of Queensland. A passionate reader especially of Joyce, Beckett, Kafka and Faulkner, Carey's work has been compared to the writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jorge Luis Borges.
As a writer Carey made his debut with The Fat Man in History (1974). It was highly praised by critics who considered his collection of short stories to be a landmark in contemporary Australian literature. They claimed that the twelve stories introduced a visionary landscape of intense clarity, where the rules of the game were bizarre yet chillingly familiar making Carey “the most genuinely original of our storytellers – a fabulist and a surrealist of disturbing power.” (Australian Book Review).
Carey has won over 10 different awards for his work including the Miles Franklin Award for Bliss (1981), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Jack Maggs (1997) and was short listed for True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) a colourful portrait of the famous Irish-Australian outlaw. Bliss is a darkly comic novel about an advertising executive, Harry Joy, who has an out-of-body experience. The story was turned into a film, written and directed by Ray Lawrence, in 1985. Oscar and Lucinda, also turned into a movie directed by Gillian Armstrong in 1997, is set in the nineteenth century, it is a caricature of the bigotry of Christianity and a love story of Oscar Hopkins and Lucinda Leplastrier. Jack Maggs is the story of a deported criminal who returns to England in secret from Australia to see his beloved son.
Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang have also received the Booker Prize and Illywhacker (1985) the story of Herbert Badgery, a 139 year old ‘illywhacker' (con man) was short listed for the same. Carey, who now lives in New York, continues to teach creative writing.