ELEANOR CATTON WINS
MAN BOOKER PRIZE
New Zealand author Eleanor Catton has, at the age of 28, become the youngest ever winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries. Her 832-page tale of the 19th-century goldfields is also the longest work to win in the prize's 45-year history.
She is not only the youngest novelist to win the coveted
literary prize, but has set a new record for the longest winning novel. The
Luminaries is 852 pages.The prize was announced by Robert Macfarlane, Chair of
the panel of judges, live on BBC News from
London’s Guildhall. The Duchess of Cornwall presented Ms. Catton with a trophy,
and Emmanuel Roman, Chief Executive of Man presented her with a cheque for
£50,000.
Ms. Catton is also the last
winner of the Booker prize that is presently confined to writers from the
Commonwealth countries and Ireland. From next year, the prize will be opened up
to writers from all countries.The Luminaries is a murder mystery set in New
Zealand during the gold-rush of the late 19 century, with astrology a running
theme through the book. It was described by Mr. Macfarlane in his announcement
speech as being “animated by a weird struggle between compulsion and
conversion: within its pages, men and women proceed according to their fixed
fates, while gold – as flakes, nuggets, coins and bars – ceaselessly shifts its
shapes around them.”Despite its size, the book is “as intricately structured as
an orrery. Each section is half the length of its predecessor, right down to
the final, astonishing pages,” Mr. Macfarlane said.
The judges returned to the
book three times, he said, and it took just under two hours to decide on the
winner. "We have dug into it and the yield it has offered at each new
reading has been extraordinary."Ms. Catton described her immediate
reaction to the news of her win as seeing a “white wall,” even as she searched
her bag – she had bought a new one as her book would not fit into the old one –
for the piece of paper on which she had written her acceptance speech.“With The
Luminaries I had a question that I wanted to ask, and the question led me in my
research from book to book, and in my writing from scene to scene, and I still
do not feel that I have answered the question in a definitive sense, but the
book is the answer to that question,” Ms. Catton said at the post-event press
conference.The question, she said, “has to do with self-knowledge, and the
degree to which the knowledge of your own destiny corrupts a person. A lot of
the characters in the book are engaged with their own past.”
Ms. Catton was just 25 when
she started writing The Luminaries, her second novel. Her debut novel The
Rehearsal (2008) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the
Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the second New
Zealander to win the Booker, after Keri Hulme for The Bone People in 1985.This
year’s shortlist for the prize has been described as among the best in the
Booker’s history. It included Harvest, by Jim Crace; The Last Testament of
Mary, a 100-page novella by Colm Toibin; A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth
Ozeki; The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri; and We Need New Names by NoViolet
Bulawayo.Eleanor Catton was born in Canada and raised in New Zealand. She
currently lives in Auckland.
Prof. John
Kurakar
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