Peter Carey

Peter Carey wanted to be a scientist, then a zoologist, and then ended up working at an ad agency. But once he started reading books his coworkers were discussing, his career path changed.

“Literature arrived in this weird and very exciting way all at once, and it was like every book that I read at that time changed my life, as it does, I think, when you begin to read,” he said.

Called “one of the world’s leading novelists,” Carey is among only five writers who have won the Booker Prize twice, first for Oscar and Lucinda and then for True History of the Kelly Gang. Viewed as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Carey has received many honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Carey is Distinguished Professor and executive director of the MFA in creative writing program at Hunter College. He discovered that he had a lot in common with the many immigrant students in his classroom. As he told the Brooklyn Rail, “There were so many first and second-generation immigration stories in that room and I could engage with these issues in ways that probably surprised my students. As an Australian I have tended to be obsessed by issues of colonialism, imperialism, the center and the periphery, and these were often the concerns of my students.”

Carey grew up in a small town outside of Melbourne and his parents ran a car dealership. At age 11, he was sent to boarding school, later observing that the separation from his family likely spurred his writing about orphans. Lately, he has been confronting Australia’s colonial past. “As I got older I thought 'what a shameful thing to have a life of writing, never having addressed it directly,’” he said.

A dual Australian and American citizen, the longtime New York resident said he straddles both cultures.

“No matter how familiar America (or at least New York) becomes to me, there is a huge part of it that appears to be alien and mad,” he said. “Both these things increase side by side, a huge fondness and a kind of terror.”