Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton is a Canadian-born New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Catton’s debut novel, The Rehearsal, was published in 2008 when she was 22. Written as her Master’s thesis, it deals with reactions to an affair between a male teacher and a girl at his secondary school. The Rehearsal won the 2009 Betty Trask Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize and on the shortlist of the Guardian First Book Award.
Catton’s second novel The Luminaries was begun at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, when she was 25, and published in 2013. The novel is set on the goldfields of New Zealand in 1866. It was shortlisted for and subsequently won the 2013 Man Booker Prize, making Catton at the age of 28 the youngest author ever to win the Booker, beating more established names like Jhumpa Lahiri and Colm Tóibín.Catton was previously, at the age of 27, the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
At 832 pages, The Luminaries is the longest work to win the prize in its 45-year history. The chair of the judges, Robert Macfarlane commented, “It’s a dazzling work. It’s a luminous work. It is vast without being sprawling.” Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles said: “I’m confident that she is destined to be one of the most important and influential writers of her generation.” Catton was presented with the prize by the Duchess of Cornwall on 15 October 2013 at Guildhall.
In 2016, The Rehearsal was adapted into a film that was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.
Catton used her winnings from the New Zealand Post Book Awards to establish the Lancewood/Horoeka Grant. The grant offers a stipend to emerging writers with the aim of providing “the means and opportunity not to write, but to read, and to share what they learn through their reading with their colleagues in the arts”.
Eleanor Catton is a Canadian-born New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Catton’s debut novel, The Rehearsal, was published in 2008 when she was 22. Written as her Master’s thesis, it deals with reactions to an affair between a male teacher and a girl at his secondary school. The Rehearsal won the 2009 Betty Trask Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize and on the shortlist of the Guardian First Book Award.
Catton’s second novel The Luminaries was begun at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, when she was 25, and published in 2013. The novel is set on the goldfields of New Zealand in 1866. It was shortlisted for and subsequently won the 2013 Man Booker Prize, making Catton at the age of 28 the youngest author ever to win the Booker, beating more established names like Jhumpa Lahiri and Colm Tóibín.Catton was previously, at the age of 27, the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
At 832 pages, The Luminaries is the longest work to win the prize in its 45-year history. The chair of the judges, Robert Macfarlane commented, “It’s a dazzling work. It’s a luminous work. It is vast without being sprawling.” Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles said: “I’m confident that she is destined to be one of the most important and influential writers of her generation.” Catton was presented with the prize by the Duchess of Cornwall on 15 October 2013 at Guildhall.
In 2016, The Rehearsal was adapted into a film that was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.
Catton used her winnings from the New Zealand Post Book Awards to establish the Lancewood/Horoeka Grant. The grant offers a stipend to emerging writers with the aim of providing “the means and opportunity not to write, but to read, and to share what they learn through their reading with their colleagues in the arts”.
The Rehearsal
2008
A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve … The Rehearsal is an exhilarating and provocative novel about the unsimple mess of human desire, at once a tender evocation of its young protagonists and a shrewd expose of emotional compromise.
The Luminaries
2013
It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand’s booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky.
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