Background
Leon Carmen was born in 1950, in South Australia.
Leon Carmen was born in 1950, in South Australia.
Carmen was educated at Unley High School.
Written under the pen name “Wanda Koolmatrie,” Leon Carmen’s My Own Sweet Time won critical acclaim. Shortly after, it was discovered that the book was the work of a forty-seven-year-old Caucasian male who used to drive a cab. Mr. Carmen’s deception was discovered when the publisher, who offered a sequel, insisted on meeting the author. As reported in the New York Times, the publisher then stopped distributing My Own Sweet Time.
A Sydney Morning Herald story said readers of My Own Sweet Time were told that “Wanda Koolmatrie was born in the far north of South Australia in 1949”; and in their advertisements, the publishers said Wanda was “removed from her Pitjantjatjara mother in 1950 [and] raised by foster parents in the western suburbs of Adelaide”. One Washington Times reviewer said, “This heartwarming comic odyssey cries out for a sequel. It could be the start of a new genre.” After Mr. Carmen’s ruse was discovered, however, Australia Council Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board director Lydia Miller called upon him to return the five thousand dollar prize for the Dobbie award, which he had collected on behalf of “Wanda Koolmatrie”, supposedly overseas at the time.
In a Sydney Morning Herald article, Carmen said his intent was to disprove the “widespread notion that middle-aged people [have] nothing to say; especially blokes”. He accused Australian publishers of discriminating against whites and men in favor of female, aboriginal, and immigrant-descended writers. He asserted in the Seattle Times, “I can’t get published, but Wanda can.”
Carmen told that his friend and agent, John Bayley, knew that Carmen planned to write the work under a pseudonym, and helped to choose the title for his novel. A "Brief of Evidence" regarding "the 'Wanda' Case" was compiled by the New South Wales Police Force against John Bayley in 1997. In 2004 Bayley published a book Daylight corroboree: a first-hand account of the "Wanda Koolmatrie" hoax, about the affair.
Carmen is also the author of the book Door to Door.
(A part-Aboriginal teenager's urban journey. First publish...)
1994Carmen married in 1970, but his marriage ended in divorce.
