Eleanor Catton

Catton was born in Canada to New Zealander parents and raised mostly in Christchurch, studying creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington and later the Iowa Writers' Workshop before publishing her debut novel, The Rehearsal, to acclaim while still in her twenties.

The Luminaries (2013), her second novel, tracks twelve men implicated in a series of crimes on New Zealand's Gold Rush-era west coast, its nineteenth-century pastiche structured with mathematical precision around the astrological positions of its characters; it won the Booker Prize when Catton was twenty-eight, the youngest winner in the prize's history.

She has since written screenplays and further fiction, and remains an outspoken commentator on New Zealand politics and the arts.