Author Peter Carey and Hermione Lee in conversation

Peter Carey interview
Man Booker Prize winning novelist Peter Carey discusses Australia’s political freedoms with the biographer and President of Wolfson College, Oxford, Professor Dame Hermione Lee. The talk is ostensibly about Carey’s latest novel Amnesia, in which a computer worm hacks into the Australian prison system releasing not only asylum seekers across Australia but also unlocking thousands of US correctional facilities and prisons. But don’t expect the conversation to remain literary for too long, as Carey and Lee plan to dissect Australian foreign policy and examine to what extent it has forfeited its own democracy by ‘brown nosing’ the CIA. The pair will explore their views on privacy and its position as an inalienable right, as well as Carey’s experience of writing about Australian politics from his new home in New York.
Amnesia Peter Carey
In Amnesia, computer hacker ‘Angel’, aka Gabrielle Baillieux, is the perfect 30-year-old daughter of a left-wing MP and an Australian actress before she releases a computer virus into the Australian prison system, freeing Australian and American prisoners. Her backers believe her intention was a deliberate political attack on the United Sates. Her mother says not, hoping Gaby won’t be extradited straight into a hovering death penalty. The story comes via the man hired to write Gaby’s story, Felix Moore, who finds himself at wrestling with forces bigger than he, as his own programmes are hacked, and discovers salvation in the pre-digital technology of the typewriter.