TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the novel “Oscar and Lucinda” written by Australian author Peter Carey has been released in bookstores across Iran.

Maliheh Ghodrati has translated the book and Afkar Publications has brought it out in 540 pages, Mehr reported.

Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel imagines Australia's youth before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story.

Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together, this unlikely pair creates and is created by the spectacle of mid-19th century Australia.

Carey's visionary brilliance, and his capacity to delight and surprise, propel this story to its stunning conclusion.

It won the 1988 Booker Prize the year it was released, and the 1989 Miles Franklin Award. It was shortlisted in 2008 for The Best of the Booker, in celebration of the prize's 40th anniversary.

The novel was adapted years later for a film of the same name, released in 1997. It was directed by Gillian Armstrong and starred Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett, and Tom Wilkinson.

Peter Carey, 81, is one of only five writers to have won the Booker Prize twice. Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988, for “Oscar and Lucinda,” and won his second Booker Prize in 2001, for “True History of the Kelly Gang”.

Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times and is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In addition to writing fiction, he collaborated on the screenplay of the film “Until the End of the World” with Wim Wenders and was, for nineteen years, executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.

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