Client details

Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Canterbury, NZ.  She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for this, her first novel.  She won the Sunday Star Times short story competition and an audience award at a one-day story contest in the 2008 Festival of the Arts Writers and Readers Week.  She is the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to study for a year at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop in the US.  She has been short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize; long-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Amazon Rising Stars promotion 2009.  She was also winner of the Betty Trask Award for Best First Novel 2009, winner of the NZ Society of Authors' Hubert Church Best First Fiction Award and has been awarded the Amazon.ca First Novel Award 2011.  Eleanor is also the recipient of a 2010 New Generation Award.

She is working on a second literary novel, titled The Luminaries, which takes place in Hokitika, New Zealand in 1866, and on a quartet of fantasy novels set during the English Civil War. She currently holds a position as Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, where she teaches Creative Writing and Popular Culture. 

Latest publication:

THE REHEARSAL, Granta, 06 July 09
A high-sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency. The sudden publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every space into a stage. But when the local drama college decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve...

The Rehearsal is an exhilarating and provocative novel about the complications of human desire. Startlingly original, it is at once a tender portrait of its young protagonists and a shrewd exposé of emotional compromise. It marks the arrival of a boldly inventive and extraordinary accomplished new voice in contemporary fiction.

Longlisted for the Orange Prize 2010; Winner of the Betty Trask Award for Best First Novel 2009; Winner of the NZ Society of Authors' Hubert Church Best First Fiction Award; Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2009; Shortlisted for the Amazon Rising Stars promotion 2009; winner of the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

Reviews:

'This is a mesmerizing, labyrinthine, intricately patterned and astonishingly original novel.  With THE REHEARSAL you get the style, the sophistication, the boundless possibility and the narrative pleasures that make up any good novel, but you get a bonus, too: a glimpse into the future of the novel itself.'  Joshua Ferris

'A wonderful debut by a truly exciting new writer - THE REHEARSAL is compulsively good and while at hte same time neing immensely readable it also continually calls into question the relationship between so called 'reality' and fiction, and the very nature of truth itself.'  Kate Atkinson

'This astonishing debut novel from young New Zealander Eleanor Catton is cause for surprise and celebration: smart, playful and self-possessed, it has the glitter and mystery of the true literary original.' Guardian

'This is a daring book, full of velvety pleasure but never afraid to show its claws, Eleanor Catton is crazily taletned and insightful - and best of all, she makes language seem new.' Emily Perkins