[3] Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times, and is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1961, Carey enrolled in a science degree at the new Monash University in Melbourne, majoring in chemistry and zoology, but cut his studies short because of a car accident and a lack of interest.

"[8] During this time, he read widely, particularly the works of Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Gabriel García Márquez, and began writing on his own, receiving his first rejection slip in 1964, the same year he married Weetman.

In 1976, Carey moved to Queensland and joined an alternative community named Starlight in Yandina, north of Brisbane, with his new partner, the painter Margot Hutcheson, with whom he lived in the 1970s and 1980s.

[15][16] The decade—and the Australian phase of Carey's career—culminated with the publication of Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which won the Booker McConnell Prize (as it was then known) and brought the author international recognition.

Nevertheless, Carey continued to set his fiction primarily in Australia and remained diffident about writing explicitly on American themes.

In a piece on True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), Mel Gussow reported that: Periodically he has thought about writing an American-based novel, and he had started one dealing with litigation.

Explaining why he continues to set most of his books in Australia, he recalled that one of his students said, "When you change countries you lose your peripheral vision."

[23]It was only after nearly two decades in the United States that he embarked on Parrot and Olivier in America (2010), loosely based on events in the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.

"[24] Carey continues to extend his canvas; in his novel, The Chemistry of Tears (2012), "contemporary London is brought intimately in touch with ... a 19th-century Germany redolent of the Brothers Grimm".

[25] In 1998, Carey was accused of snubbing Queen Elizabeth II by declining an invitation to meet her after winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Jack Maggs (1997).

While Carey is a republican, in the Australian sense, he insists that no offence was intended: What happened, he explains, was that he had already been in England recently for a literary festival; he is booked for another trip soon, and had been travelling so much that he asked the prize organisers, "Would it be possible to see Her Majesty when I was actually in London?"

"[27] The unhappy circumstances of Carey's breakup with Alison Summers received publicity (largely in Australia) in 2006 when Theft: A Love Story appeared, depicting the toxic relationship between its protagonist, Butcher Bones, and his ex-wife, known only as "the Plaintiff".

Writers including John Berger, Deborah Eisenberg, Eve Ensler and Keith Gessen all[31] abhorred the murders while objecting to the PEN executive's unilateral decision to give the award.

[38] On 11 June 2012, Carey was named an Officer of the Order of Australia for "distinguished service to literature as a novelist, through international promotion of the Australian identity, as a mentor to emerging writers.