Peter Carey


Born
in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia
May 07, 1943

Website

Genre


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Not all books on this profile are by the same author. 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
...more

Peter Carey isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.

Peter Carey on Ned Kelly: ‘Did no one see what I saw, that our famous bushranger was a raging poet?’

Twenty-five years after his award-winning book was published, the Australian author revisits True History of the Kelly Gang

How very weird to return to this old manuscript, the scene of so much doubt and anguish, not to say obsession.

I was a baby when the seed was planted, three years out of school, two years since my devastating failure in the first year of a science degree. I had drifted into adv

Read more of this blog post »
 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on August 09, 2025 13:00
Average rating: 3.62 · 94,319 ratings · 8,267 reviews · 102 distinct worksSimilar authors
True History of the Kelly Gang

3.83 avg rating — 24,176 ratings — published 2000 — 56 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
Oscar and Lucinda

3.73 avg rating — 21,813 ratings — published 1988 — 108 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
Parrot and Olivier in America

3.44 avg rating — 7,604 ratings — published 2009 — 66 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
Jack Maggs

3.69 avg rating — 4,434 ratings — published 1997 — 76 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
Bliss

3.76 avg rating — 3,581 ratings — published 1981 — 48 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
A Long Way From Home

3.50 avg rating — 3,778 ratings — published 2017
Rate this book
Clear rating
The Chemistry of Tears

2.96 avg rating — 4,236 ratings — published 2012 — 75 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
Theft: A Love Story

3.43 avg rating — 3,616 ratings — published 2006 — 67 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
My Life as a Fake

3.38 avg rating — 3,618 ratings — published 2003
Rate this book
Clear rating
Illywhacker

3.78 avg rating — 3,092 ratings — published 1985 — 54 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
More books by Peter Carey…

Related News

Journey into the storied Black Forest with Carey's latest work, The Chemistry of Tears, about a grieving museum expert and the 19th-century...
19 likes · 2 comments
Australian author Megan Goldin is a former journalist whose thriller The Escape Room is about four colleagues who get trapped...
31 likes · 16 comments
Quotes by Peter Carey  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.”
Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

“You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.”
Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

“People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else”
Peter Carey, Collected Stories

Polls

September 2021 New School Classic Group Read

 
  56 votes, 26.3%

Blindness by José Saramago, 1995, 326 pages
 
  53 votes, 24.9%

Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham, 1930, 308 pages
 
  30 votes, 14.1%

The Bone People by Keri Hulme, 1984, 450 pages
 
  24 votes, 11.3%

These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer, 1926, 352 pages
 
  19 votes, 8.9%

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, 1987, 277 pages
 
  18 votes, 8.5%

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, 1988, 515 pages
 
  13 votes, 6.1%

More...


Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite Peter to Goodreads.