Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton MNZMis a Canadian-born New Zealand author. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize. In January 2015, she created a short-lived media storm in New Zealand when she made comments in an interview in India in which she was critical of "neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture."...
NationalityNew Zealander
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth24 September 1985
love money
Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love.
fell home love youth zealand
My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.
books children loved reading
I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.
love together reason-why
Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.
front love people
I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.
conferred man prefer prestige
Is the prestige conferred by the Man Booker prize for the book or me? I would prefer it on the book and for me to be treated ordinarily.
until
An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.
blanket garage wrap
There was a computer in our garage when I was growing up, and I'd go out there in winter and wrap myself in a blanket and write a story.
complement gets great itself renewable social teaching
Teaching is a great complement to writing. It's very social and gets you out of your own head. It's also very optimistic. It renews itself every year - it's a renewable resource.
guided margaret took towards
Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
direction
From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea.
actively art connect literature looking people power reading reject work
I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.
amplified car cheerfully either fact family injustice owning quite thank
My sense of injustice about our family's 'weirdness' in not owning a car was amplified by the fact that we did not own a television, either - my parents were unapologetic about this and told me very cheerfully that I would thank them for it when I was older, which was quite true.
describing historical rushes second though zealand
My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.'