Eleanor Catton MNZM is the author of three novels and has also worked as a screenwriter, adapting her novel The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen’s Emma for feature film. Her novels have received international prizes and acclaim including the 2013 Man Booker Prize, and her work has been translated into over twenty-five languages around the world.

Her first book The Rehearsal (2009), was published when she was 22, and won the New Zealand Best First Book of Fiction Award and the Betty Trask Prize, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize. In 2016 The Rehearsal was adapted for feature film, written by Emily Perkins and directed by Alison Maclean.  The Luminaries (2013) won the 2013 Man Booker Prize, making her the youngest-ever recipient of the prize (at age 28) and with the longest book (at 826 pages). Her most recent book Birnam Wood (2023) is a brilliantly constructed tale of intentions, actions and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival. Birnam Wood was shortlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.

In 2014 Eleanor donated her New Zealand Post Book Awards prize money to establish a new kind of grant for New Zealand writers. The Horoeka/Lancewood Reading Grants, named after the New Zealand native tree that transforms in maturity, gives young New Zealand writers the means and opportunity to read. The scheme was later expanded to become the Lancewood Foundation, a philanthropic organisation ‘dedicated to the art and joy of reading’.

Eleanor holds Masters degrees in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in 2014 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington. Eleanor has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Auckland, and most recently at the Manukau Institute of Technology. She is a seasoned participant in national and international festivals.

Born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Britain.

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Te Herenga Waka University Press writer page

Granta Books author page

Wikipedia

Website for the Horoeka/Lancewood Reading Grants