Author of the week: Eleanor Catton

last updated 8 January 2015

Eleanor Catton certainly has gotten the last laugh on her critics, said Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian (U.K.). Last week, the 28-year-old New Zealander became the youngest author ever to win the Man Booker Prize when The Luminaries, her 800-page second novel, was declared this year’s champ. The honor was powerful vindication for a book that, though widely praised, took some hits from a handful of critics who bashed the book’s length and use of an omniscient narrator. Catton suspects that they weren’t judging the work on its merits. “People whose negative reaction has been most vehement have all been men over 45,” she says. “There’s a feeling of, ‘All right, we can tolerate [this] from a man over 50, but we are not going to be spoken to like that by you.’”

Catton now faces a different kind of challenge, said Sameer Rahim in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). The Booker comes with a cash prize of about $80,000 and sends readers rushing out to buy the winner. But Catton knows well that even if the windfall ends up exceeding $1 million, as some estimate, she can’t let money change her the way that the pursuit of gold-rush riches in 19th-century New Zealand changed every one of the characters in The Luminaries. “As an artist you need to be not at all entitled,” she says, “so money is kind of worrying. You can start to expect things if you’re used to a certain level of comfort.” Still, she’s confident she can keep a sense of perspective. “I know the things that matter—my transformation happened in the writing of the book.”