Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 23 October
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
The Edge, Fed Square
The Atrium Flinders Street Federation Square Melbourne Victoria 3000
Get directions
Peter Carey is one of Australia’s great novelists – and the only one to have won the Booker Prize twice.
His intricately inventive novels delve deep into questions of what it is to be human – and often, what it is to be Australian, too. His characters are risk-takers and mavericks, outcasts and oddballs – from a young Ned Kelly in the award-winning The True History of the Kelly Gang to Butcher Boone, Theft’s ‘wildman’ artist imprisoned for stealing his own paintings.
‘Carey is an artist who churns and curses and worries and frets,’ wrote a besotted Patrick Ness in the Guardian. ‘His novels roil, threatening at any moment to erupt impolitely all over the carpet. He is formally ostentatious, often inventing fabulist characters with equally fabulist voices and generally remaining allergic to adjective-free naturalism.’
In his latest novel, Amnesia, Carey leaves behind the historical fiction he’s best known for, in favour of a thoroughly contemporary situation – a ‘what if’ novel set in 2010, addressing the fiercest political concerns of 2014.
A young Australian hacker sends a worm into the computerised control systems of hundreds of Australian prisons, freeing the prisoners. Because Australian prison security is mostly designed and sold by American corporations, the worm spreads to the US.
Has this Australian woman declared cyber war on the US? Or was her Angel Worm intended only to open the prison doors of those unfortunates detained by Australia’s harsh immigration policies?
Peter Carey will talk to Michael Williams about his provocative new novel, his body of work, and his complicated, questioning relationship with his country of origin. This is a rare opportunity to hear one of our most successful exports – and finest writers – in person.
In conversation with Michael Williams.
Featuring
Peter Carey
Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943. He claims his birthplace of Bacchus Marsh had a population of 4,000. This fact should probably be checked. He was educated at the local state school until the age of 11 and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 — after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived.
In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was 19. For the next 13 years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.
After four novels had been written and rejected, The Fat Man in History — a short-story collection — was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success.
From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success, he began work on The Tax Inspector.
In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week. Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize.
In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the director of the MFA program in creative writing. Since then he has published five novels: My Life as a Fake, Theft, His Illegal Self, The Chemistry of Tears, and Parrot and Olivier in America (which was a finalist for both the US National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize.)
Michael Williams
Michael Williams is the editor of The Monthly. He was previously the Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne as its ...