Peter Carey

Peter Carey was born on May 7, 1943, in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, the son of Percival and Helen Carey, who ran the local Holden car dealership. He boarded at Geelong Grammar School from 1954, a jolt from working-class Bacchus Marsh into the accents and manners of Australia's ruling class, then enrolled at Monash University in 1961 to study chemistry and zoology. A serious car accident just before his final exams left him thinking he'd earned an excuse to fail; the university offered supplementary exams instead, which he failed anyway, and in 1962 he took a job in advertising in Melbourne. There he fell in with older writers moonlighting as copywriters, including Barry Oakley and Morris Lurie, and began writing fiction on the side through years of rejection. His first collection, The Fat Man in History, appeared in 1974, and War Crimes followed in 1979. Bliss, his first novel, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1981. Illywhacker (1985), narrated by a 139-year-old liar, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), the story of a nervous clergyman and a glass-obsessed heiress who gamble on transporting a church across the outback, won it outright, along with a second Miles Franklin. In 1990 Carey moved to New York, where he has lived ever since, eventually directing Hunter College's MFA program in creative writing for nearly two decades. True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), which gives the outlaw Ned Kelly his own voice, won Carey a second Booker Prize in 2001, making him one of only five writers to win it twice. He continued publishing into his seventies, including Parrot and Olivier in America (2009) and A Long Way from Home (2017), and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2012. In 2025, at 82, he announced he was finished writing novels, though not with writing altogether.

In 1961, right before his final exams at Monash University, Carey survived a serious car crash. He later said he took it as a gift from God, an excuse to fail. He woke in the wreck with his scalp peeled back and blood on his face. The university gave him supplementary exams instead, which he failed too, and he took a job in advertising.