Vale Gabrielle Carey

Gabrielle Carey, the author of multiple works of fiction and nonfiction, including Puberty Blues, co-written with Kathy Lette, and the Prime Minister’s nonfiction award-winning Moving Among Strangers, has died, aged 64.

UQP writes:

‘UQP was privileged to publish two books by Gabrielle Carey in the past decade—her revelatory Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my family (2013), which jointly won the Prime Minister’s Award for Nonfiction, and Only Happiness Here: In search of Elizabeth von Arnim (2020). Both books illuminated her love of literature and her fascination with writers and writerly lives, and through them she also sought to understand her own life.

‘Publishing director Madonna Duffy has fond memories of working with Gabrielle on these two books. “Her passion for literary lives and her ambition to create the finest narrative nonfiction made her an absolute delight to publish. Her victory in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award was a life highlight for her and a brilliant recognition of her bibliomemoir skills.”

‘Says her literary agent Jane Novak, “Gabrielle Carey was one of Australia’s greatest writers and her skill as a memoirist and biographer is particularly notable. But it was her unflinching examination of the human condition that I loved her for. That, and her formidable intellect and her wonderful sparkling and spiky personality. This is a terrible, terrible loss.”

‘Vale Gabrielle. As you have so lovingly remembered other writers, so, too, will your words be remembered.’

Category: Obituaries