Writing For The Ages

“The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.” – Peter Carey

Born in May 1943, Carey is Australia’s next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, having already won the Miles Franklin Award three times and the prestigious international Booker Prize twice.   Those latter awards came for his bestselling novels Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, also made into an award-winning movie. 

                                    The author of 21 books, several short story collections, and numerous screenplays, he has been honored as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He is one of just two living Australians to be represented on postage stamps as an "Australian Legend." 

In addition to his writing, Carey serves as executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College at the City University of New York.   “I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from,” he said of his motivation for writing.  “So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Writer’s Moment with a friend at http://writersmoment.blogspot.com