Eleanor Catton |
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Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Canterbury. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for The Rehearsal.
In June 2009 The Rehearsal (Victoria University Press, NZ and Granta, UK) won the UK Society of Authors' Betty Trask Award worth £8,000 and it was named best first book of fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2009. It was also longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award
She also won the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short story competition and the audience award at Once Upon a Deadline, a one-day story contest in the 2008 NZ International Arts Festival Writers and Readers Week and was awarded the 2008 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.
Eleanor is currently in the States studying creative writing at the University of Iowa. She was the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship which enabled her to attend the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Big International Deals for Eleanor Catton
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Eleanor Catton has secured a top UK literary agent and has just signed major contracts with two prestigious international publishers. Caroline Dawnay, United Agents, London, says “I rarely take on more than two or three new clients in a year, but The Rehearsal was a book that I had to represent.” Little, Brown (USA) and Granta Books (UK) are both very excited about Eleanor’s book and have leapt at the chance to publish her in their respective markets. With a Brazilian pre-empt accepted recently, the list of foreign language publishers is now up to 9:
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Holland: Ambo Anthos
France: Denoel
Sweden: Wahlstrom & Widstrand
Norway: Oktober
Italy: Fandango
Spain: 451 Editores
Germany: Arche-Atrium
Israel: Am Oved
Brazil: Record
Praise for The Rehearsal
This astonishing debut novel from young New Zealander Eleanor Catton is a cause for surprise and celebration: smart, playful and self-possessed, it has the glitter and mystery of the true literary original. Though its impulses and methods can only be called experimental, the prose is so arresting, the storytelling so seductive, that wherever the book falls open it's near-impossible to put down.
Justine Jordan THE GUARDIAN
In common with more traditional school-age stories, dawning self-consciousness and disappearing innocence are key subjects. But it is the inventiveness with which Catton plays on these themes, not the themes themselves, that makes this book so engaging. It would be tempting to call it experimental, if that word didn’t suggest writing that is stodgy and self-indulgent. To the contrary, The Rehearsal is controlled, elegant and utterly readable, even at its most slippery.
Adrian Turpin THE FINANCIAL TIMES
As debuts go, this one is astral – as well as teasing, intelligent and knowing. It made me think of ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ (1955) and of its author, Françoise Sagan, another young writer of stellar talent.
Tom Adair THE SCOTSMAN
Timeframes overlap and collide in this ingenious ontological kaleidoscope of a debut, but the experimentalism — which demands that the reader keep all her wits about her — is tempered by a real knack for narrative and a cast of painfully familiar teenage characters who are all desperate to be as confident, cool, charismatic and funny as possible. These are qualities that the extraordinary Eleanor Catton has in spades.
Melissa Katsoulis THE TIMES
The DAILY TELEGRAPH reviewer, in an equally enthusiastic review, wrote that “Catton shows she can address the big themes in life while remaining alert to small details.”
Catton’s writing is remarkably assured. The cleverness of the concept and structure – which could otherwise have risked archness – is balanced by the characters’ intensity of emotion.
TLS
Back at home, Louise O'Brien writing in The Listener called Eleanor Catton “a new talent who has arrived fully formed, with an accomplished, confident and mature voice”.