Peter Carey Australian Literature

Peter Carey

Australian Literature

Carey, Peter (1943- ), Australian novelist and short-story writer, known for his vivid stories of contemporary life, which combine surreal, grotesque, and humorous elements. Carey’s first published work, a collection of short stories, The Fat Man in History (1974), was well received and established him as one of Australia’s important contemporary writers and literary innovators. The series of novels that followed confirmed his reputation and consolidated his style, a mixture of realism and fantasy that has been compared to the work of American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, and Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Bliss (1981), Carey’s first novel, is the story of an advertising executive who sees his life and the world around him differently after a near-fatal heart attack. Bliss was made into a motion picture in 1985, with a screenplay by Carey.

Among Carey’s other novels are Illywhacker (1985), a work of epic scope about a 139-year-old conman, and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), a love story set in the 19th century, which won Britain’s highest literary award, the Booker Prize. His novel The Tax Inspector (1991) describes the unusual investigation of the Catchprice family by a tax inspector who is eight months pregnant. The Unusual Life of Tristam Smith (1994) tells the story of a boy’s search for his father’s identity while struggling to come to terms with a birth defect. The novel Jack Maggs (1998) is an imaginative reworking of Great Expectations (1860-1861) by English writer Charles Dickens. Carey’s fiction also includes War Crimes (1979), a second collection of short stories, and The Big Bazoohley (1995), a novel of fantasy for children. In 2001 Carey won his second Booker Prize, this one for the novel True History of the Kelly Gang, a fictional account of the life of famed Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Carey became just the second writer to win the Booker Prize twice (South African author J. M. Coetzee was the first).