Eleanor Catton has won the 2013 Booker Prize
The MA in Creative Writing graduate is the youngest winner in the award's history.
The Man Booker is one of the most prestigious and coveted literary prizes in the world. MA in Creative Writing graduate Eleanor Catton, 28, is the youngest winner in the award's history and, at 832 pages,The Luminaries (Victoria University Press, NZ, and Granta, UK), is the longest book ever to win.
The other writers shortlisted were Jim Crace, NoViolet Bulawayo, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruth Ozeki and Colm Toibin.
The Luminaries is a 19th century West Coast gold-rush murder story with a 20-part cast and a richly patterned structure. It is Eleanor's second novel.
The Man Booker judging panel described The Luminariesas 'simply luminous; a novel of arch craft and tender heart'. Chair Robert Macfarlane called it 'a magnificent novel: awesome in its structural complexity; addictive in its story-telling and magical in its conjuring of a world of greed and gold.' He summed up Eleanor's achievement as 'awesome; 'or should that be oresome?' Read the full speech. Perhaps we here at the IIML can add '"O" for orsome'?
The only other New Zealand author to win the Booker was Keri Hulme in 1985, for The Bone People, which was also set on the West Coast. Lloyd Jones's novel Mr Pip was shortlisted in 2007.
Accepting the award, a visibly stunned Eleanor spoke of the worth of creativity in a culture that increasingly measures every enterprise by monetary value.
She acknowledged the influence of Lewis Hyde's 1982 classic The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World on her understanding of the West Coast during the Gold Rush era; in particular its dual economies of 'gold, prized by Europeans for its value, and greenstone or pounamu, prized by Maori for its worth.
'Gold being pure currency, can only be bought and sold. Pounamu as a symbol of belonging or prestige can only be given', she said. 'An economy based on value, in Lewis Hyde's conception, is not necessarily inferior to an economy based on worth, but the two must somehow be reconciled in the life of an artist who wishes to make a living by his or her gift, by his or her art.' Read Eleanor's full acceptance speech.
Describing her epic novel as 'a publisher's nightmare', Eleanor thanked Victoria University Press and Granta for striking the 'elegant balance between making art and making money', leaving her 'free throughout to concern myself with questions not of value, but of worth.'
Fergus Barrowman, of Victoria University Press, was an early champion of Eleanor's work. ''We are delighted for Ellie and for the further international recognition the Man Booker Prize will bring The Luminaries', he said of her win. 'It's a big ambitious book written by a fearlessly intelligent and talented writer. It's a novel for readers who love great storytelling and it's wonderful that the judges have chosen to recognise that with this illustrious prize.'
The IIML's Director Damien Wilkins, who supervised Eleanor during her MA in Creative Writing in 2007, has described her as 'above all...a risk taker', and The Luminaries as 'a mad enterprise', adding 'we need more mad enterprises.'
Asked to comment on what her win might mean for New Zealand literature, he said: 'I hope [it] means that readers and writers receive a great jolt about this thing we call New Zealand writing. Our national literature is often boxed up as worthy and an obligation. The Luminaries jumps out of the box, and reminds us that imaginative acts from here belong in the larger conversation of culture. It’s not that we’ve received a stamp of approval—more that a wonderful novel simply asserts its right to be read.
'Ellie’s achievement is of course an individual triumph, made from years of meticulous work and motored by massive skill. At the IIML, where Ellie wrote her first novel, we also like her generosity in always suggesting that the community of writers she studied with and became friends with, has been a sustaining force in her writing.'
Read more from the New Zealand literary community on Ellie's win.
Eleanor was born in Canada and grew up in Christchurch. In 2007, she graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria's International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). She won that year's Adam Prize for her manuscript The Rehearsal, which was published by VUP in 2008, and subseqently by Little, Brown (USA) and Granta (UK). The novel won local and international awards, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the Orange Prize. It has since been published in twelve languages.
'The IIML experience was absolutely invaluable to me', she has said. 'The programme equipped me with the tools, vocabulary, and confidence to begin to take myself seriously as a writer.'
Read more:
Man Booker winner's announcement
These Rough Notes: Victoria University Press blog
TVNZ One News (watch an excerpt from Ellie's acceptance speech)
Elizabeth Knox on The Luminaries (Read her speech from the launch on 3 August 2013 at Unity Books)