Kelly: An Australian Robin Hood?

"On the other hand it's really written for, and I know I joke about it, 'my people'.

"It is my country's great story, and it is told in that sentimental, conservative spirit that just wants to tell that story.

"But I wanted my friends in New York to be able to read it and to understand it."

Testimony

The book, says Carey, took three years to write.

The whole novel is a first-person narrative in the form of a testimony written by Ned Kelly himself, and told in his awkward, uneducated but expressive style.

Carey said that once he had found the voice of Ned Kelly, it was "weirdly easy to write - in the sense that it does grow out of our soil, it grows out of who we are".

Carey with Booker judges chairman Kenneth Baker

"I was sometimes worried about narrative pace and I had to deal with that in different little ways throughout the book - you have to throw out a sea anchor from time to time."

Carey admits he found himself thinking in Ned Kelly's voice: "I'd write emails like that.

"Even the bits of the book which are in a different voice, but I still kept using 'were' in stead of 'was' - it got to be very deep in me."

Carey, who teaches creative writing in New York, noted that two of authors on the Booker shortlist - Ian McEwan and Andrew Miller - were from the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich.

'Smarter readers'

But he says that there are limits to what can be taught on such courses.

"Most of them are not going to be writers - you're producing smarter readers, teaching a way of reading that's different to academic reading.

"And as for me, I just try to teach them basic skills - not a way to write but some things about how to evoke a character physically, how to use the body.

"I would think that I'm trying to give them those skills.

"I'm not there to make them write a certain way."

And the author is unrepentant about how many of his novels have historical settings.

"This book is about filling in lies and silences and Australian history is like that, and we keep going back to the past to correct it."

"The past is about the present - and that's why it's important," he said.