Booker-winning author of The Luminaries uses New Zealand Post prize money to encourage 'the first step' to good writing
'Writers are readers first' … Eleanor Catton. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
Eleanor Catton, the youngest ever winner of the Man Booker prize, has announced that she will put the money from her latest awards win towards establishing a grant that will give writers "time to read".
Catton's The Luminaries, set during New Zealand's 19th-century gold rush, took the Booker last year, when Catton was just 28. It has now won the Kiwi author the New Zealand Post best fiction and people's choice awards, and Catton has said that she will use her winnings of NZ$15,000 (£7,500) to help other writers.
Speaking at the awards ceremony, the author said that she is now in the "extraordinary position of being able to make a living from my writing alone, something I never dreamed was possible", and so it "seems only right to do as Emery Staines" – a character from The Luminaries – "would do, and start giving this fortune away".
Her grant, she said, is intended to give its recipient "the means and opportunity not to write, but to read, and to share what they learn through their reading with their colleagues in the arts".
"Writers are readers first; indeed our love of reading is what unites us above all else. If our reading culture in New Zealand is dynamic, diverse, and informed, our writing culture will be too," she told those attending the ceremony.
The grant has yet to be given a name, "in case a nice philanthropist hears about this and would like to lend their name and support to the project", but Catton said that the word which keeps coming to her as a possibility "is the horoeka, or lancewood, a native tree that begins its life defensively, with sharp rigid leaves and a narrow bearing, and at a certain point transforms into a shape that is confident, open and entirely new – so different, in fact, that the young and old versions of the tree look absolutely unalike. That is what I believe that reading can do."
Catton told the Guardian she intended that writers winning the grant would be awarded $3,000 each for "time to read". "My idea is that if a writer is awarded a grant, they will be given the money with no strings attached except that after three months they will be expected to write a short piece of non-fiction about their reading (what was interesting to them, what they learned) that will be posted online so that others can benefit from their reading too," she said.
"We're very lucky in New Zealand to have a lot of public funding available for writers, but they generally require the writer to have a good idea about what they want to write, and how, before they apply. I think that this often doesn't understand or serve the creative process, which is organic and dialectic; I also think it tends to reward people who are good at writing applications rather than, necessarily, people who are curious about and ambitious for the form in which they are writing. I'm also uncomfortable with the focus that it places on writing as production, with publication as the end goal, rather than on writing as enlightenment, with the reading as the first step."
Her move follows the author Chris Cleave's call earlier this summer for established writers to support the next generation of novelists. Cleave believes that "today's forces in book retail are lethal to new talent", and so "more than ever before it is up to the serious literary prizes and to established authors to seek out, champion and amplify the best new voices".
Speaking as he unveiled Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing as winner of the Desmond Elliott award in July, chair of judges Cleave said that today's major writers "have an unshirkable responsibility to raise up the next generation of novelists, to be an antidote to the shortsighted venality that seeks to crush publishers and their flair for taking risks", because if this generation of writers does not "give life to the next", they will be "damned as the ones who let literature be murdered on our watch".
Catton's The Luminaries, set during New Zealand's 19th-century gold rush, took the Booker last year, when Catton was just 28. It has now won the Kiwi author the New Zealand Post best fiction and people's choice awards, and Catton has said that she will use her winnings of NZ$15,000 (£7,500) to help other writers.
Speaking at the awards ceremony, the author said that she is now in the "extraordinary position of being able to make a living from my writing alone, something I never dreamed was possible", and so it "seems only right to do as Emery Staines" – a character from The Luminaries – "would do, and start giving this fortune away".
Her grant, she said, is intended to give its recipient "the means and opportunity not to write, but to read, and to share what they learn through their reading with their colleagues in the arts".
"Writers are readers first; indeed our love of reading is what unites us above all else. If our reading culture in New Zealand is dynamic, diverse, and informed, our writing culture will be too," she told those attending the ceremony.
The grant has yet to be given a name, "in case a nice philanthropist hears about this and would like to lend their name and support to the project", but Catton said that the word which keeps coming to her as a possibility "is the horoeka, or lancewood, a native tree that begins its life defensively, with sharp rigid leaves and a narrow bearing, and at a certain point transforms into a shape that is confident, open and entirely new – so different, in fact, that the young and old versions of the tree look absolutely unalike. That is what I believe that reading can do."
Catton told the Guardian she intended that writers winning the grant would be awarded $3,000 each for "time to read". "My idea is that if a writer is awarded a grant, they will be given the money with no strings attached except that after three months they will be expected to write a short piece of non-fiction about their reading (what was interesting to them, what they learned) that will be posted online so that others can benefit from their reading too," she said.
"We're very lucky in New Zealand to have a lot of public funding available for writers, but they generally require the writer to have a good idea about what they want to write, and how, before they apply. I think that this often doesn't understand or serve the creative process, which is organic and dialectic; I also think it tends to reward people who are good at writing applications rather than, necessarily, people who are curious about and ambitious for the form in which they are writing. I'm also uncomfortable with the focus that it places on writing as production, with publication as the end goal, rather than on writing as enlightenment, with the reading as the first step."
Her move follows the author Chris Cleave's call earlier this summer for established writers to support the next generation of novelists. Cleave believes that "today's forces in book retail are lethal to new talent", and so "more than ever before it is up to the serious literary prizes and to established authors to seek out, champion and amplify the best new voices".
Speaking as he unveiled Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing as winner of the Desmond Elliott award in July, chair of judges Cleave said that today's major writers "have an unshirkable responsibility to raise up the next generation of novelists, to be an antidote to the shortsighted venality that seeks to crush publishers and their flair for taking risks", because if this generation of writers does not "give life to the next", they will be "damned as the ones who let literature be murdered on our watch".
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