Eleanor Catton

The Novel is set on the goldfields of New Zealand in 1866.

Eleanor Catton (born 1985) is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter.

Born in Canada, Catton moved to New Zealand as a child and grew up in Christchurch.

She completed a master's degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Catton was born in Canada in 1985, where her father was a graduate student completing his doctorate at the University of Western Ontario on a Commonwealth scholarship.

Her mother Judith is a New Zealander from Canterbury, while her father, philosopher Philip Catton, comes from Washington State.

Her family returned to New Zealand when she was six years old, and Catton grew up in Christchurch.

Her mother was a children's librarian at the time, and the family had no TV; Catton was an avid reader and writer from an early age.

When she was aged 13 the family spent a year living in Leeds while her father was on a sabbatical at the university, and Catton attended local comprehensive Lawnswood School which she referred to as "amazing" and "gloriously rough".

Back in Christchurch she attended Burnside High School, studied English at the University of Canterbury, and completed a Master's degree in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington.

She is related to historian Bruce Catton.

Her award-winning debut Novel, The Rehearsal, written as her Master's thesis, was published in 2008, and has been adapted into a 2016 film of the same name.

Catton's debut Novel, The Rehearsal, was published in 2008 when she was 22.

Written as her Master's thesis, it deals with reactions to an affair between a male teacher and a girl at his secondary school.

The Rehearsal won the 2009 Betty Trask Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize and on the shortlist of the Guardian First Book Award.

That year Catton was awarded a fellowship to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she completed her MFA and taught creative writing until 2011.

In 2011, she was the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury, and in 2012 a writer in residence at the Michael King Writers' Centre in Auckland.

Her second Novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton the youngest author ever to win the prize (at age 28) and only the second New Zealander.

It was subsequently adapted into a television miniseries, with Catton as screenwriter.

In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.

Catton's second Novel The Luminaries was begun at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, when she was 25, and published in 2013.

It was shortlisted for and subsequently won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton at the age of 28 the youngest author ever to win the Booker, beating more established names like Jhumpa Lahiri and Colm Tóibín.

Catton was previously, at the age of 27, the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

At 832 pages, The Luminaries was the longest work to win the prize in its 45-year history.

The chair of the judges, Robert Macfarlane commented, "It's a dazzling work. It's a luminous work. It is vast without being sprawling."

Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles said: "I'm confident that she is destined to be one of the most important and influential writers of her generation."

Catton was presented with the prize by the Duchess of Cornwall on 15 October 2013 at Guildhall.

In November 2013 Catton was awarded the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for fiction for The Luminaries.

In January 2014 it was announced that Catton would be awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature in May at Victoria University of Wellington, where she has studied.

In the 2014 New Year Honours, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature.

Catton made zombie movies with her friends as a teenager and participated in the 48Hours film challenge, but never studied screenwriting.

When Luminaries was adapted into a television miniseries Catton was screenwriter, an "unusual if not entirely unheard-of" arrangement.

Catton wrote hundreds of drafts of the pilot episode, but in late 2015 BBC Two declined the series; she then shifted the focus to make the protagonist Anna Wetherell, a minor character in the book, and rewrote the series, which was commissioned by the BBC in mid-2016.

She served as showrunner with director Claire McCarthy during filming.

In 2016, The Rehearsal was adapted into a film of the same name directed by Alison Maclean.

It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.

The six-episode TVNZ and BBC series debuted on 17 May 2020.

Catton also wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film version of Emma, adapted from Jane Austen's Novel.

She admitted she had never actually read the Novel when approached to write the screenplay, but was familiar with more recent adaptations, including the film Clueless.

Catton's third Novel, Birnam Wood, was published in February 2023.