The Australian novelist Peter Carey is the winner of the 2015 Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. He joins an elite list of writers that includes Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Harold Pinter, Muriel Spark and Kazuo Ishiguro, and is flying over from New York to receive the award at this year’s Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. We offer an informal guide to one of the world’s pre-eminent contemporary novelists.
His sleepwalking son inspired his only children's bookK
Carey’s son Sam once sleepwalked out of a hotel room at 1am and couldn’t get back in. He was eventually returned by hotel security. The incident inspired his children’s book The Big Bazoohley (1995). Alongside 13 novels, Carey has also written numerous short stories, four works of non-fiction and two screenplays — an adaptation of his first novel, Bliss (1981), and Until the End of the World, filmed by Wim Wenders in 1991.
He could have written Julian Assange's biography
In 2011, Carey’s American publisher asked him if he wanted to ghostwrite the memoirs of his fellow Australian, Julian Assange. It was “never a serious offer”, Carey has claimed, yet Amnesia (2014) features a radical journalist writing the biography of a radical hacker, and promotes the theory that the CIA was behind the 1975 collapse of the left-wing Australian government of Gough Whitlam. Carey has espoused other progressive views. In April 2015, he boycotted a Pen awards ceremony after the organisation honoured the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Carey and other writers criticised Charlie Hebdo for attacking a “section of the French population that is already marginalised, embattled, and victimised”.
He is on an Australian stamp
In 2010, Australia issued two 55-cent postage stamps in his honour. Another writer featured in the series, David Malouf, said that Carey’s picture made him look like Seneca. Thomas Keneally said he was glad the stamps were self-adhesive, “because it prevents jokes about licking their backside”. Carey is always described as an Australian writer, but he has lived in New York since 1990, and has dual American and Australian citizenship.
He has a phobia about bridges
In his travelogue, 30 Days in Sydney, Carey describes driving across the Sydney Harbour bridge in 1975 when “some alien panic took me, rushing through me in a great hot wave”. Returning 25 years later, he has a dream in which he climbs the bridge, conquers his terror and is granted a vision of the harbour and “how vile and crooked it had always been”. His greatest fear, he says, is being “compelled to drive across the Severn bridge”.
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His parents ran a car dealership
He grew up in a small mining town with the fictional-sounding name of Bacchus Marsh (he has described himself as a “Marshian”.) His father had little formal education, his “totally formidable” mother “used to sit there in the garage and men would come in and she’d argue with them about car parts… And they’d say, ‘I want to see the manager!’ And she’d say, ‘I am the manager.’ ” His parents sent him to Geelong Grammar, which cost them £600 a term (“incredible money, as they always reminded me”).
He is one of only two authors to have won the Booker prize twice
He won in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. When a reporter asked his mother if he had called to tell her, she answered: “Ring me? Why would he ring me? He never rings me,” which Carey said “was totally untrue”.
His novels might feature real people — or real names
He admits to using friends’ names in his novels — he drops in the name of one, Stephen Wall, “to check if he’s really reading them...He’s not such a committed reader, so I keep moving his name further towards the end of the book just to give him some exercise.” In his latest novel, Amnesia, he plunders his own biography for the fairly unsympathetic character of Felix Moore. But, Carey insists, “I never base characters on real people”.
He wanted to be a scientist
As a schoolboy, he was “fanatical” about being an organic chemist, and later studied zoology. Things went awry when he fell in love and began faking experiments, working backwards from the desired result. After failing his exams, he ended up in an advertising agency where all the copywriters were writers or artists. “I don’t think I got a single piece of copy accepted all the time I worked there,” he has said.
He writes in boxes
He has described his novels as being made out of “building blocks of story”. He even draws little squares when planning them. He told the American critic Robert Polito: “Inside the square I write what should happen inside the box. I’ll probably have as many as 10 different threads of story locked inside the box.” He described the 111 short chapters of Oscar and Lucinda as being like tessellating tiles.
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He once lived in a hippie commune
In the late 1970s, after seeing a photo “of this picturesque hut in a health-food-shop window in Sydney”, he went to live there. There was no phone and, at first, no water. Once a month he flew to Sydney to work for five days in an advertising agency. The rest of the time he was “hanging out with people who saw wood nymphs wearing hats and neat little boots”. It was there that he wrote Bliss, his first novel.
Peter Carey talks to Peter Kemp at the Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday, October 10, at 6.45pm (cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature)