About Eleanor Catton: Eleanor Catton is a Canadian-born New Zealand author. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
Any description of a person that comes from the outside is very hard to deal with. People don't like being summarised. It's nice to receive a compliment, but it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.
I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.
You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.
The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me.
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.'
My parents took me to the Bronte parsonage in England when I was a teenager. I had a fight with my mum, burst into tears, jumped over a stile and ran out into the moors. It felt very authentic: A moor really is an excellent place to have a temper tan...
In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.
The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other.
There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically di...
What I wanted to create with 'The Luminaries' is a book that had structural patterns built in that didn't matter, but if you cared about them, you could look into the book and see them.
'The Luminaries' is such a different book to 'The Rehearsal.' There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there's a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there'...
When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'
The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves.
There are so many ways of posturing that people associate with being a writer. They imagine you wearing a beret and drinking only red wine and being full of yourself, and so, for a long time, the way I felt about writing was too private. I felt it to...
I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually.
Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.
A trip to the picture framer's, with a selection of prints, is the most joyous outing I can imagine. I've spent more money on framing than on anything else I own.
As an artist, you need to be not at all entitled in your relation with the work. So money is kind of worrying. You can start to expect things if you're used to a certain level of comfort.
I think it's more optimistic about human nature to acknowledge that people are the products of their time but then to see that they have moments of grace and dignity that everybody has.
Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of t...
