Peter Carey
The FACTS list does not name a single work by Peter Carey, which the structural recipe requires as an opening. Rather than invent titles, the biography below opens instead on his most prominent award and proceeds from there, keeping strictly to what the facts support.
Peter Carey received the Booker Prize, the highest honor in English-language fiction, and has built a career across several forms of writing, working as a novelist, screenwriter, children's writer, and university teacher.
Born on 7 May 1943 in Bacchus Marsh, Australia, Carey was educated at Monash University before establishing himself as a writer in the English language. His Australian citizenship grounds a body of work that has drawn recognition from multiple award bodies: alongside the Booker Prize, he received the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Banjo Award for Fiction, and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. The breadth of those honors reflects a career that spans literary fiction and work for younger readers, as well as writing for the screen.
His standing within literary and academic institutions is substantial. Carey was made an Officer of the Order of Australia and received the Bodley Medal. He holds fellowships in both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Royal Society of Literature, and has worked as a university teacher. It is as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature that his reach beyond Australia is most formally acknowledged.
Quotes by Peter Carey
Peter Carey's insights on:
There are people that you don't like because you're jealous of them until you meet them. And you haven't read their book because it's had so much attention. Then you meet them and discover they've been jealous of you, and you become friends.
I was very anxious when I was writing 'Oscar And Lucinda.' I would take other books off the shelf to check my chapter length was OK.
I used to say when I was younger, 'I'm exhausted; writers can only write for four hours a day and that's done.' Now I find, as I'm getting older and I'm more aware of time, I can actually write all day.
I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all - even if it does continue to terrify me.
Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' had an immense effect on me, and most of my novels bear the burn marks of this experience, those short chapters with their conflicting points of view, truth expressed by multiple perspectives. The other attractive thing about 'As I Lay Dying' was the way it gave rich voices to the poor.
I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing, I was always supporting myself. That's the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression.