The two-time Booker-winning novelist Peter Carey turned down the opportunity to ghost the memoirs of his fellow Australian – and WikiLeaks founder – Julian Assange, he has revealed.

Speaking to the Bookseller, Carey said that he was approached by his American editor Sonny Mehta and asked if he would like to co-write the book. “But I thought, no. Two control freaks? It wouldn’t work,” he told the books magazine.

Assange’s memoir was eventually ghostwritten by the novelist Andrew O’Hagan, but the WikiLeaks founder pulled out of the deal at the final hour, with publisher Canongate going on to release the book as an “unauthorised autobiography”. O’Hagan shed light on the arrangement in a revelatory London Review of Books essay earlier this year. “The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses,” wrote O’Hagan. “He didn’t want to do the book. He hadn’t from the beginning.”

Carey’s own forthcoming new novel, Amnesia, is out in November, and deals with a young Australian hacker who releases the “Angel Worm” into Australia’s prisons, unlocking their doors as well as those of some 5,000 American jails. The title, the Bookseller reveals, refers to “Australians collectively forgetting they are an American client state, run roughshod over by the superpower”.

‘I’m trying to deal with the little country/big country thing’ … Peter Carey Photograph: Flora Hanitijo for the Guardian

“I’m trying to deal with the little country/big country thing: how the little country loves the big country, and how the big country fucked over the little country,” Carey told journalist Tom Tivnan, adding that he believes that Australia’s constitutional crisis of 1975 could have led to WikiLeaks.

“When Assange appeared, my first thought was, ‘he’s Australian’. No one really dealt with that. What was going on in my mind was [the US] fucked Australians over, so [Assange] fucked them over.”

Carey, who won two Booker prizes for his historical novels True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda, also spoke out about Amazon’s pitched battle with Hachette over terms for ebooks, which has been played out in public over the summer, saying “the truth is far more complicated than Amazon are arseholes and publishers are saints”.

“What I primarily think is that someone ought to start caring about the producers of the content,” said Carey. “Publishers are making a shitload of money because of the [reduced] costs on ebooks, writers less and less. Publishers better start changing their P&Ls [profits and losses], and giving a better royalty rate than the pitiful one that they are offering on ebooks. Publishers have let this happen as historically they have just rolled over for Amazon.”