Booker winner's archive auctioned

Carey: "Past is about the present"

The personal archive of two-time Booker prize winner Peter Carey has been auctioned for Aus$80,000 (£28,500).

Investors snapped up unpublished novels, notebooks and typescripts belonging to the 58-year-old writer.

Carey's Oscar and Lucinda was later filmed

Included in the auction was the manuscript for Oscar And Lucinda, which won the Booker in 1988.

The auctioneers said the successful bidders were a mixture of private collectors and Australian cultural institutions.

Carey's prize-winning novel this year - True History of the Kelly Gang - is the fictionalised memoirs of outlaw and Australian folk hero Ned Kelly.

Champion

Kelly remains an ambiguous figure in Australian history.

An orphan and champion of the poor, he was also a thief and was hanged for murder.

Carey, who now lives in New York, is only the second writer to have won the Booker twice.

Kelly: An Australian Robin Hood?

South African JM Coetzee won for his novels Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K.

Among the 26 lots for auction were nine handwritten notebooks in which Carey recorded his ideas.

There was also the typescript for one of his early novels, Bliss and an early version of Illywhacker, written at a time when Carey was suffering from writer's block.

He was Booker shortlisted for Illywhacker in 1985, the memoirs of a 100-year-old confidence man, or "illywhacker".