Young author's world turns upside down after making the prestigious shortlist for the Man Booker Prize
Catton's novel The Luminaries is among the top six of the 151 novels entered for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Photo / Sarah Ivey
Catton's novel The Luminaries is among the top six of the 151 novels entered for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Photo / Sarah Ivey

The smartest young writer anyone is ever likely to have coffee with is cosily wrapped in a knitted jumper against the spring freshness. It is the morning after the plane arrived from Britain via Sydney and delivered her from a stream of interviews. It is the week after the week in which her life changed. Where she once was Ellie Catton, writer of enormous potential, she is now Eleanor Catton, Man Booker Prize shortlisted author. And on Tuesday, she turns just 28.

 Having woken in her own bed for the first time in eons, she pushed exhaustion aside and agreed to one more interview, a kind of integration home after a circuit of British book festivals that accelerated into that mad whirl of appointments when her novel, The Luminaries, was named among six in the running for the best-known prize for fiction, never mind the £50,000 ($96,000) prize that goes to the winner.

 Catton is the third New Zealander to be shortlisted, after Keri Hulme, who won in 1985, and Lloyd Jones. If she wins, she will be the youngest to do so. Heady stuff. Fortunately, Jones has provided brilliant counsel. "He wrote me a couple of really lovely emails. He told me to go down to Ladbrokes and take a bet on myself, which I thought was really awesome advice." The bookies have her as third-favourite.
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