After living in New York for 25 years, Peter Carey has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters – "the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States". Only 250 living artists are members at any time and Carey, who has dual-citizenship, is the second Australian-born writer to join after Shirley Hazzard, who has noted that she and her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, were the only married couple among the membership. Carey, who is known for his teaching at Hunter College as well as his writing, was inducted in May with 11 others including photographer Robert Frank, poet Billy Collins and The New Yorker editor and writer, David Remnick. British writer Julian Barnes is one of two new honorary foreign members. Carey told Undercover he "had a foreigner's pleasure in being accepted...I live with the daily social knowledge that these writers are my peers, but I have an equal and opposite sense that I belong to an alien race whose passions and experience are, of course, not American". He said he had conflicting emotions because a member had to die to make a seat available. "In my imagination I think that it was [poet] Phil Levine who gave me his place. I had enjoyed his company since I arrived in New York in 1990." But the only practical difference this made to his life was "they give you a little buttonhole medal, the same size and shape of the Order of Australia. Now you can have dual nationality, but you can't have dual buttonholes, so this New York contest the AO wins for being the rarer and cooler of the two". Other writers in the academy include Edward Albee, Paul Auster, Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, Rita Dove, Dave Eggers, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Janet Malcolm, Lorrie Moore, Tony Morrison, Philip Roth and Marilyn Robinson.

OWN A LEIGH HOBBS ORIGINAL

Artist, author and children's laureate for 2016-17 Leigh Hobbs has a new range of original artworks, limited edition prints and hand-coloured etchings for sale at booksillustrated.com.au. Among his many award-winning picture books, Mr Chicken Goes to Paris was shortlisted for the 2010 Prime Minister's Literary Awards in 2010, adapted for the stage by NIDA, and is popular in the Louvre bookshop in Paris. Children (and adults) love his characters such as Mr Chicken, Old Tom, Horrible Harriet and Fiona the Pig, and these would make beautiful presents.

PRO-WAR PRIME MINISTERS

Colin Steele's revealing piece about the Prime Minister's Literary Awards in these pages last week stirred lots of reaction. David Stephens, editor of the Honest History website, notes that each time a prime minister has intervened in the judging (2006, 2013 and 2014) the book they boosted as winner or co-winner was about military history – The Great War by Les Carlyon, Farewell, Dear People by Ross McMullin, and The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. Stephens writes: "...one wonders whether having a war theme gives a book a track of its own – somewhat akin to the way the Australian War Memorial seems to get special deals from government (compared with other cultural institutions) when it comes to budget funding and cuts." But he also notes the sheer number of books with a war theme in the National Library catalogue – up from 51 in the 1960s to 215 in 2000-2010, according to research by Carolyn Holbrook, and no doubt many more in this period of world war anniversaries – which gives them a strong chance of being shortlisted.