Eleanor Catton on ManBooker longlist
The MA in Creative Writing graduate has been longlisted for her second novel The Luminaries.
Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (forthcoming from Victoria University Press) has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for 2013. At 27, she is the youngest writer on a list that includes well-established writers such as Colm Toibin, Jim Crace and Jhumpa Lahiri.
The Luminaries is set in Hokitika in the gold-rush years of the 1860s. Wide in scope with a large cast of characters, the novel stretches over 848 pages and is an astonishing feat of storytelling.
Fergus Barrowman, publisher at Victoria University Press said, 'I've been carrying The Luminaries like a big, golden secret for months. Readers are going to love it. I'm so happy for Ellie that she's received this international recognition so early in the book's public life.'
Catton completed the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria in 2007 and won that year's Adam Prize with her manuscript for The Rehearsal (Victoria University Press, NZ and Granta, UK). She was also the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship which enabled her to attend the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop.
In 2009 The Rehearsal won the UK Society of Authors' Betty Trask Award worth £8,000 and was named best first book of fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. It was also longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
Catton is our guest at Writers on Mondays on 5 August, speaking with VUP's Fergus Barrowman about 'the origins, mysteries and fates that led to this extraordinary new work.'
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