Peter Carey

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Peter Carey AO (as Peter Philip Carey ; born May 7, 1943 in Bacchus Marsh , Victoria ) is an Australian writer.

Life

He began his career with advertising copy, published his first short stories in 1974 and his first novel in 1981. He is now considered to be the most important living writer in Australia. He has been awarded the Booker Prize twice. After Melbourne , London and Sydney he now lives in New York . He worked together with Wim Wenders on the script for the film " Until the End of the World ". Today he is director of the “Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing” program at Hunter College , a department of the City University of New York .

Adolescence, training, first attempts at writing

Peter Carey's parents ran a car dealership, Carey Motors. He attended Bacchus Marsh State School from 1948 to 1953, then went to Geelong Grammar School as an intern between 1954 and 1960 , about 50 km southwest of Melbourne, until he graduated from school. In 1961 Carey enrolled in Natural Sciences at Monash University in Melbourne . His main subjects were chemistry and zoology. He dropped out of this course relatively quickly without a degree because he found no inner interest in the course content and university structures.

He worked for various advertising agencies between 1962 and 1967. Here he was involved in advertising campaigns for Volkswagen and Lindeman's Winery, among others . It was his work in the advertising agencies that brought him into contact with regional writers Barry Oakley and Morris Lurie. This introduced him to the latest literary trends in Europe and America. Carey married his first wife, Leigh Weetman, in 1964.

During this time he read intensively, in particular studying James Joyce , Samuel Beckett , Franz Kafka and William Faulkner . In 1964 he began his first experiments. Four years later, he had completed several manuscripts, including the novels entitled Contacts , The Futility Machine, and Wog, and a collection of short stories. Everything was previously unpublished. Some of these manuscripts were initially accepted by a publisher, but later finally rejected.

In the late 1960s he toured Europe and parts of the Middle East. The trip ended in London in 1968, where he started working again for an advertising agency. He returned to Australia in 1970 and resumed his work in the advertising industry in Melbourne and Sydney.

First successes as a writer

While Carey continued his job as an advertising man, he wrote and published short stories in magazines such as Meanjin and Nation Review . Most of these short stories appeared in the book The Fat Man In History (1974). In 1974 he divorced Weetman and moved to Balmain, a suburb of Inner West Sydney, where he worked for Grey's Advertising Agency.

In 1976 he went to Queensland and joined an alternative community called "Starlight" in Yandina, Queensland, north of Brisbane . He concentrated on writing for three weeks, then worked in Sydney for the fourth week. It was during this period that he wrote most of the short stories that would later appear in the volume War Crimes , as well as his first published novel, Bliss . He lived with the painter Margot Hutcheson during the 1970s and early 1980s.

Carey opened his own advertising agency in 1980, the Sydney agency “McSpedden Carey Advertising Consultants”, in collaboration with Bani McSpedden. In 1981 he moved to Bellingen , New South Wales in northern New South Wales . He married the theater director Alison Summers in 1985 and around 1990 he sold the shares in McSpedden Carey and went to New York for the sake of his wife, as she could achieve better professional life there. During this time he worked on the novel The Tax Inspector .

New York City

Carey taught creative writing at New York University (NYU) . The marriage lasted approximately two decades and two children emerged from it. Carey and Summers are now divorced and Carey is now in his fourth marriage in London with the British publisher Frances Coady, as long as he is not in his apartment in New York. He has both Australian and US citizenship.

In 1998 he provoked a media storm in a water glass in the UK when he turned down an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II after winning the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Jack Maggs . The British tabloids believed that the rejection of the award was motivated by his Republican beliefs. However, family and personal reasons were officially given at the time. Carey later said he had asked to postpone the meeting. The meeting has also been rescheduled from the palace.

Content references of his works

Almost all of his literary plots relate to Australia, its people and history. In this respect, despite his dual citizenship, he has to be explicitly described as an Australian writer. Oscar and Lucinda (1988) offers a portrait of two people from 1864 who lived outside the norms of their time, the 19th century in Australia and England. Jack Maggs (1997), an unsentimental, tense reinterpretation of the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens , is set primarily in London from 1837, but leads to a successful life as an emigrant in Australia. Carey proceeds similarly with Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne , whom he parodied in 1994 in The Strange Life of Tristan Smith . His novel True History of the Kelly Gang sensitively depicts the outlaw Ned Kelly , who lived from 1855 to 1880 as Australia's most legendary robber and public enemy.

Carey's novel The Chemistry of Tears (2012), on the other hand, is set in London from 2010, but with a background story from Germany in the 1850s. The novel Amnesia (2014) also begins in 2010 and describes the struggle of a young Australian hacker who succeeds in electronically unlocking all doors in dozens of Australian prisons. As early as 2011, he was asked by his New York editor Sonny Mehta if he wanted to play the ghostwriter for Julian Assange's autobiography, which he had emphatically declined.

honors and awards

  • 1988: Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda
  • 1998: Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Jack Maggs
  • 1998: Miles Franklin Award for Jack Maggs
  • 2001: Commonwealth Writers' Prize for True History of the Kelly Gang
  • 2001: Booker Prize for True History of the Kelly Gang
  • 2001: Miles Franklin Award for True History of the Kelly Gang
  • 2007: Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Theft: A Love Story

Carey has been awarded honorary doctorates by three universities and is a member of the Royal Society of Literature , the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 2010 the Australian Post honored him with a stamp.

Works

Novels

For children
Short stories
  • The Fat Man in History. 1974.
  • Was crimes. 1979.
  • Exotic pleasures. 1990.

Non-fiction

  • A Letter to Our Son. 1994.
  • 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account. 2001.
    • Instructions for use for Sidney. German by Regina Rawlinson. Piper, Munich, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-492-27522-2 .
  • Wrong About Japan. 2005.
    • Wrong about Japan - a trip to Tokyo. German by Eva Kemper. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 2005, ISBN 3-10-010227-4 .

Film adaptations

Literary template

script

Web links

Carey in online databases

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Creative Writing MFA Home
  2. ↑ Wyndham, Susan. "A love-hate story" , The Sydney Morning Herald , April 1, 2006. Retrieved 5 February of 2010.
  3. ↑ a b c Peter Carey: 'Privacy should be a human right, but we've been tricked out of it' , Guardian interview on October 17, 2014, accessed October 18, 2014
  4. ↑ a b Bookbrowse Biography
  5. ↑ In an article entitled "Carey on Dickens, the Queen and Ned Kelly," Alan Atwood interviewed Carey for The Sydney Morning Herald , June 5, 1998 p13. Carey stated that the meeting with the Queen had only been postponed, not canceled, as some English newspapers had misreported.
  6. ↑ "Great extrapolations" Hermione Lee reviews Jack Maggs by Peter Carey , review in The Guardian on September 28, 1997, accessed October 18, 2014
  7. ↑ Peter Carey to tackle computer hacking and international politics in new novel , The Guardian, March 25, 2014, accessed October 18, 2014
  8. ↑ Australia Post Stamp Bulletin no 303, March 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Carey, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Carey, Peter Philip (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian-American writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 7, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Bacchus Marsh , Victoria