Australian · b. 1943
Peter Carey has won the Booker Prize twice—for "Oscar and Lucinda" (1988) and "True History of the Kelly Gang" (2001). The Australian author writes about Australia's past with invention and sympathy: nineteenth-century eccentrics, outlaws, convicts. "Illywhacker" is a 500-page lie told by a 139-year-old con man. Carey lives in New York but remains Australia's most celebrated novelist.