Catton, Eleanor (1985-…), a New Zealand author, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for her historical novel The Luminaries (2013). It was her second novel. The prize, now called the Booker Prize, is the major literary award in the United Kingdom. Catton was the youngest writer to win the prize. The Luminaries also won the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction. The Governor General’s Awards are the highest national literary prizes given in Canada.
Catton set The Luminaries in the gold fields of New Zealand in 1865 and 1866. The novel runs more than 800 pages and features 20 major characters, all interacting with each other at various times in the narrative in an intricate plot based on astrology. The story shifts back and forth in time as it blends romance, mystery, murder, conspiracy, and suspense with an epic sweep of life in frontier New Zealand. Catton wrote the novel in the literary style of such Victorian English writers as Charles Dickens.
Catton attracted praise with her first novel, The Rehearsal (2008). Catton wrote the book as her master’s thesis while attending Victoria University of Wellington. The novel is set in a high school and centers on a sex scandal involving a teacher at the school and one of his female students. The line separating reality from theater wavers when the scandal is dramatized by a local acting company.
Catton’s novel Birnam Wood (2023) is set in contemporary New Zealand. It describes a group of activists who plant crops in abandoned places. Their situation becomes more complicated when they plan to buy some abandoned farmland that an American billionaire also wants for his mining operation.
Catton was born on Sept. 24, 1985, in London, Ontario, Canada, where her father had come from New Zealand to attend graduate school. Catton’s family returned to New Zealand when she was 6 years old, and she grew up in Christchurch. She received a B.A. degree in English from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in 2005 and an M.A. degree in creative writing from Victoria University in 2008. She received an M.F.A. degree from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop in 2010. In 2013, Catton was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. The honor was bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II for Catton’s services to literature.
