By 3 News online staff
New Zealander Eleanor Catton's second novel The Luminaries has won the prestigious Man Booker Prize.
At 28, Catton is the youngest writer to win the prestigious £50,000 award - and her ambitious, epic 832-page novel is easily the longest.
Catton had been bookmakers' joint favorite among the six prize finalists, alongside British novelist Jim Crace, for his rural parable The Harvest. The other finalists were Jhumpa Lahiri, Colm Toibin, Ruth Ozeki and NoViolet Bulawayo.
"Even just knowing that they'd submitted my name into the pool was exciting enough, but then getting chosen was just unbelievable," Catton told 3 News in July.
Catton received her trophy from Prince Charles' wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, during a dinner ceremony at London's medieval Guildhall.
New Zealand author Lloyd Jones' book Mr Pip was shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2007, but the only Kiwi to go on to win the prize was Keri Hulme in 1985, the year Catton was born, with The Bone People.
The Luminaries centres on a man named Walter Moody who comes to a New Zealand prospecting town in 1866 and finds himself immersed in a web of saloons, seances and skullduggery.
The book's elaborate narrative is structured according to astrological charts: It consists of 12 sections, each half the length of the last, from a 360-page opener to a final section of a single page.
Travel writer Robert Macfarlane, who chaired the judging panel, called The Luminaries ''dazzling" and "luminous".
"It is vast without being sprawling," he said.
"You begin it, feel you are lost, think you are in the clutches of a big, baggy monster ... but soon realise you are in something as tightly structured as an orrery," a device for measuring the planets.
"It is beautifully intricate without being fussy," Macfarlane said.
"It is experimental ... but does not by any means neglect the traditional virtues of storytelling."
Macfarlane said the novel "requires a huge investment from the reader" but delivers big returns.
"It begins in fixity and then it accelerates out of it, and once you are on the down slope, the pace is irresistible," he said.
He said it was a book that "takes place in a culture which is utterly capitalised" and focused on money, but also dwells on tenderness and love.
Macfarlane said the panel of five judges met for two hours - brief by Booker standards - to choose the winner, which was decided without a vote. "No blood was spilled in the judging," he said.
Catton, who was 25 when she started writing the book and 27 when she finished it, has published just one previous novel. Now she has won a prize that brings a huge boost in profile, publicity and sales, and whose laureates include V.S. Naipaul, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes and Hilary Mantel.
Macfarlane said The Luminaries was a fitting winner - "a global novel that is always intensely local".
And its sheer size - eight times the length of Toibin's 104-page The Testament of Mary - had an added benefit for the judges.
"Those of us who didn't read it on e-readers enjoyed a full upper-body workout," Macfarlane said.
This is the last year that the Booker - founded in 1969 and officially named the Man Booker Prize after its sponsor, financial services firm Man Group PLC - will be open only to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies.
Beginning next year, Americans and other English-language writers will be able to enter as well.
The rule change aims to expand the global scope of the Booker even further, although some fear it may alter the delicate chemistry of the prize.
AP / 3 News
source: newshub archive
