Eleanor Catton Wins Man Booker Prize - US report

Shelf Awareness

photo: BBC

New Zealand author Eleanor Catton won the £50,000 (about US$79,987) Man Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries. In doing so, she established a pair of records as the youngest winner in the prize's history (she is 28, but completed it at age 27), as well as writing the longest winning novel (832 pages).

Chair of judges Robert Macfarlane described The Luminaries as a "dazzling work, luminous, vast.... a book you sometimes feel lost in, fearing it to be 'a big baggy monster', but it turns out to be as tightly structured as an orrery.... We read it three times and each time we dug into it the yields were extraordinary, its dividends astronomical."

Macfarlane also addressed the book's length, saying that it "never poses a problem if it's a great novel. The Luminaries is a novel you pan, as if for gold, and the returns are huge." He added, however, that "those of us who didn't read it on e-readers got a full-body workout from the experience."

Ultimately, Macfarlane said, "Maturity is evident in every sentence, in the rhythms and balances. It is a novel of astonishing control."

The Telegraph noted that Catton's family in New Zealand does not have a television and had not yet had a chance to speak to her about the result. "I feel very honored and proud to be living in a world where the facts of somebody's biography doesn't affect how people read the book," she said. "I think that's true of age and also ethnicity and all sorts of features of being human. When people can look beyond that and consider the work in itself, it's always a good thing, so I think we're lucky in that way."

The Luminaries was released in the U.S. yesterday by Little, Brown.