Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton MNZMis a Canadian-born New Zealand author. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize. In January 2015, she created a short-lived media storm in New Zealand when she made comments in an interview in India in which she was critical of "neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture."...
NationalityNew Zealander
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth24 September 1985
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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.
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My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors.
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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 tantrum.
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Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field.
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Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
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I'm the rogue Canadian in my family - I just happened to be born here while my parents were studying here.
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I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.
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I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
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The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.
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My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.
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I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things.
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I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.
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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 too important and didn't want to be teased about it. So I lied about it.
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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.