Peter Carey

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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 July 2008 15.39 BST

1943-

"My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country."

Birthplace

Victoria, Australia

Education

Monash University; enrolled for a science degree; failed first-year exams.

Other jobs

Advertising copywriter; academic; also lived in an 'alternative' community.

Did you know?

Carey wrote the critically panned Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World.

Critical verdict

Carey's left-field sensibility and style have matured into serious fiction with a lightly ironic touch. He has won the Booker Prize twice: for Oscar And Lucinda and, in 2001, the much more readable - despite its lack of commas - True History of the Kelly Gang, fictional letters from the Australian outlaw and folk hero Ned Kelly. The judges awarding the Commonwealth Writers' Prize to Jack Maggs summed it up: "The themes of colonial self-denial and the search for the recovery of the original self are here... in a narrative that forces us to reflect on the meaning of history."

Recommended works

His dazzlingly experimental short stories are very different from his novels; · Jack Maggs is a tour de force - page-turning literary-critical-historical pastiche.

Influences

Carey says his great influences are Joyce, Faulkner and Beckett.

Now read on

JM Coetzee provides a harsher take on post-colonialism.

Adaptations

Bliss was filmed in Australia in 1985; Oscar And Lucinda (1997), starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett, caught the strange sweetness of Carey's novel.