True history of the Kelly gang

True History of the Kelly Gang is a novel by the Australian writer Peter Carey, first published in 2000. It is a fictional memoir written as if by the bushranger Ned Kelly, and it draws on the style of the Jerilderie Letter.

The book begins with Kelly's father, John Kelly, transported to Van Diemen's Land and later settling in the colony of Victoria, where he marries Ellen Quinn and takes his family to the country northeast of Melbourne. Red Kelly's quarrels with the colonial police lead to prison and to his death when Ned is twelve, and the family moves on under the Land Grant Act to a part of the colony where his mother keeps a shebeen and takes a series of lovers, one of them a bushranger. Ned's own path into horse theft, police trouble and the gang that made him famous follows from there, and the novel tells it in the voice of a man writing to a daughter he has not seen.

The book was first published by the University of Queensland Press and later abroad, and it won the Booker Prize in 2001. A film adaptation followed in 2020.