‘He is a master craftsman. He can flip an omniscient third-person perspective into an intimate first with the flick of a letter-writing quill. He can hoist aloft hilariously low material on the lever of an elegant nineteenth-century sentence structure. He is surprising, at times so devastatingly tender he can kill you with a line no longer than a needle.’

Award-winning writer Sarah Krasnostein shines new light on the impossibly vulnerable Ned Kelly of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey, who moved from Australia to America, conjured Kelly after seeing Sidney Nolan’s paintings of the bushranger at the Met. In this moving essay Krasnostein, who moved from America to Australia, interrogates notions of home, history, distance and identity in Peter Carey’s Booker Prize–winning novel.

In the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.