Eleanor Catton, the youngest ever winner of the Man Booker prize, talks about how her novel The Luminaries was plotted in the stars
Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley
The Telegraph - 17 Oct 2013
At the start of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, a man “not quite eight and twenty” arrives on foreign shores bearing a valuable story. On Tuesday night, Catton, a New Zealander who has just turned 28, was awarded the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for her second novel – a rollicking, 832-page historical yarn. Perhaps this might not seem a significant coincidence, but when I mention it to Catton, she lights up. She loves making unusual connections and seeing unexpected patterns.
I’m speaking with her on the morning after her victory and, though I can detect traces of the previous night’s celebrations – make-up still sparkles on her cheeks – she is bright-eyed and energetic. “I got in from the after-party around 4.30 this morning,” she says, “and was up for an interview at 7.30.” I ask her what it feels like to be the youngest ever Booker winner. “It feels awesome. One of the strange things about the last few months is that I’ve been living in a state of anxiety. At the party that Granta hosted, there was champagne and everything was so joyful, but I still felt these flashes of nervousness: what’s going to happen about the Booker?” She laughs. “And then I’d have to steel myself and think: I don’t need to worry about this any more.”
Catton’s first novel, The Rehearsal, was a postmodern account of a school sex sandal. Though fiendishly clever, it was also a tough read. The Luminaries is a completely different beast. It is a pastiche of a 19th-century sensation novel in the manner of Wilkie Collins, and a hugely entertaining page-turner that keeps you going to the very end. Catton tells me: “I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.”
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