Peter Carey

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2008

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Peter Carey. He says he grew up in his homeland "thinking that Australian history was dull and Australian literature was dull" and that he developed a strong passion to make it new and fresh. In this he has surely succeeded - he is one of only two novelists to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice.

Yet he came to writing relatively late. The son of a car salesman he started off studying science but he abandoned his university career and ended up, in his 20s, drifting into advertising. It was only then that his literary awakening began. "I announced with great confidence one day, 'I’m going to be a writer',' he says, 'I’m an obsessive fool, I was determined to do it!"

Favourite track: The Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah by George Frideric Handel Book: Austerlitz by W G Sebald Luxury: A ‘magic’ pudding and a drink

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2008. My castaway this week is the writer Peter Carey. He is one of the most highly acclaimed authors in the English language and is one of only two to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice.
0:37.0	He's Australian, but has spent much of his life living abroad for a short time in Britain and for many years in America, although his homeland still
0:45.0	draws him back and inspires him.
0:47.8	His upbringing there was on the face of it conventional, but he was always slightly at odds with his family a bit out of place at school and totally out of his depth at university.
0:57.0	In the end, he drifted into a job in advertising and then one day he declared he was going to become a writer. I just decided it was what I was going to do and I'm an obsessive fool.
1:08.0	Having announced I was going to do it, I was determined to do it. So Peter Kerry writing then not a vocation but a decision that's
1:17.8	very unusual. Well it was a little more complicated or a little more obvious in the sense that I certainly fell far from university into an advertising agency and found my I fell amongst writers or people who were writing at nights and at weekends and I began to read all at the same time.
1:37.0	And to discover at that time, William Faulkner say,
1:42.0	I couldn't have imagined anything like that even existed in the world.
1:47.0	And to read this sort of jewel-like language, and this man also giving voice to the voiceless, made me sort of drunk and I was
1:54.3	determined that I would do exactly the same thing and of course I'm somebody that
1:57.8	read nothing pretty much so I was very foolish and very ignorant, but protected by that ignorance.
2:05.0	I marched ahead.
2:07.0	That's a, it was a great little phrase you used there,
2:11.0	being drunk on this writing. I mean there was a sense in which you
2:15.6	were giddy with the opportunity and with the artistic flowering that was
2:19.2	opened up to you and that would have been in your early 20s. Yes I mean I remember in those years we used to go to in Melbourne to stock car racing and they
2:27.6	had racing fuel that had a very heady smell to it I think was it metal benzene or
2:32.4	something like that?
2:33.2	And so in a funny way you were sort of drunk on that smell.
	...

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