The Youngest Author to Win the Prize

AWARD// New Zealand author Eleanor Catton won the 2013 Man Booker prize for English fiction on Tuesday for her novel The Luminaries, to become the youngest winner in the award’s 45-year history. The 28-year-old novelist poked fun at the size of her 848-page tome about the 19th century New Zealand gold rush and thanked British publishers Granta for their patience. “I’ve actually just had to buy a new handbag because my old handbag was not big enough to fit my book,” Catton told journalists at a hasty press conference. Chair of judges Robert Macfarlane described Catton’s second novel, set in the New Zealand goldfields of 1866, as dazzling and very clever. “The Luminaries is a magnificent novel: awesome in its structural complexity; addictive in its story-telling; and magical in its conjuring of a world of greed and gold,” he said. Catton’s story tells the tale of Walter Moody, who arrives in the goldfields to seek his fortune and stumbles across a tense gathering of local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes.