Lorien Kite talks to: Man Booker winner Eleanor Catton aout her win, astrology - and Harry Potter

  By Lorien Kite - Financial Times

©Alastair Levy

Eleanor Catton, winner of the Man Booker 2013

The headlines all but wrote themselves when Eleanor Catton won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries at London’s Guildhall this week. Catton, who has just turned 28, is the youngest author to take the £50,000 award and the first New Zealander since Keri Hulme in 1985. Her novel, at 832 pages, is also by a considerable margin the longest winner in Booker history.

Yet for all the firsts, and against a shortlist widely seen as the strongest in years, it somehow didn’t feel like a surprise. A multilayered literary whodunnit set amid an 1860s New Zealand gold rush, The Luminaries had been one of the bookies’ favourites since the shortlist was announced last month. Chairman of the judges Robert Macfarlane, summing up his panel’s unanimous verdict, described it as “a novel of astonishing control”. And Catton herself, though slightly unsteady of voice, exuded assurance as she read her acceptance speech on Tuesday night. To borrow a line of her own novel’s fluent Victorian prose, this is a writer possessed of both youth and conviction.

The composure is still on display the following day as an underslept Catton talks me through the genesis of The Luminaries. It arose in part from a desire to test the boundaries between literary and genre fiction – a distinction she likens to that between Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies. “The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other.”

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