About the Author: Peter Carey
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943.
He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 — after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived.
In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was nineteen.
For the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.
After four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History — a short story collection — was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success.
From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success he began work on The Tax Inspector.
In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week. Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize.
He collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders.
In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In the years since he has written My Life as a Fake, Theft, His Illegal Self and Parrot and Oliver in America (shortlisted for 2010 Man Booker Prize).
Find the best price forParrot and Olivier in America
Peter Carey
Goodreads rating: 
Paperback, by Penguin Books
ISBN10: 0143203525 | ISBN13: 9780143203520
Page count: 452
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2010 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD (USA) AND THE 2010 COMMONWEALTH WRITERS' PRIZE
'It is like being alive at the time Dickens was writing, I think he's that good. This novel is right up there with his best. It is an amazingly ambitious, ingenious, clever, wonderful book.'
Andrew Motion, Chair of the 2010 Man Booker Prize
When the young French aristocrat Olivier is sent to the New World, apparently to study its prisons but in reality to avoid another revolution, Parrot is sent with him. The son of an English printer, Parrot wanted to be an artist but has ended up as a servant. They make an unlikely pair but as their adventures with love and money, goal and painting show them, there's nowhere better for unlikely things to flourish than in the glorious, brand-new democratic experiment, America.
Carey's most acclaimed novel since True History of the Kelly Gang, Parrot and Olivier in America is a virtuoso portrait of the Old World colliding chaotically with the New. Above all, it is the wildly funny and tender story of two men who come to form an almost impossible friendship, and a completely improbably work of art.
'Once this novel grabs you, it holds you. Heart as well as brain. A cracking adventure.'
Jennifer Byrne, The Age
'Possibly the most charming and engaging novel this demon of a storyteller has yet written.
Paul Auster
'Gorgeously entertaining, and moving ... A novel of fierce attachments, charting the proximity of beauty and terror in the human soul.'
O, The Oprah Magazine
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