Tuesday, April 10, 7:00 PM

"Uncommonly exciting and engaging. As much as anyone now writing, Peter Carey is a master of storytelling. His empathy with his characters, combined with his psychological sharp-sightedness, has them almost jumping off the page in full human complexity."

-Sunday Times (London)

Winner of the 1988 Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia, and presently lives in New York City, where he teaches at Columbia University. "Destined to [be] one of the most widely read and admired writers working in English," according to Edmund White, Carey is the author of six highly-decorated novels, as well as three screenplays, two story collections, and a children's book. Of his latest novel, Jack Maggs, the London Review of Books declared, "The novelist inside Carey's books is the muddled, ironic double of the writer who manipulates words and people, seems absolutely in charge, is a master of dialogue (often unexpected, never redundant) and is calculatedly liberal in the proliferation of event." His The True History of the Kelly Gang, a novel inspired by Australia's mythic outlaw Ned Kelly, is due to be published in February 2001.