At 28, Eleanor Catton was the youngest-ever winner of the Man Booker Prize. Her novel The Luminaries ‒ only her second ‒ won her the prize in 2013, creating the interesting combination of youngest winner and longest book (832 pages).
You've spoken about how reading is the biggest inspiration to your writing. What were you reading before you wrote The Luminaries?
In my reading life, there are two different types of reading I do. There's just reading for the love of it, and then there's reading imaginatively for when I've got an idea and a direction.
Before I wrote The Luminaries, I was reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou, which is hugely important to me. Particularly, this idea of a relationship between two human beings who are both strong enough in their selfhood to be able to look at somebody else, and apprehend them as a different soul.
And the process of reading imaginatively is to ask, "How could I make this work for me?" In the case of I and Thou I was thinking, could I write a novel where the entire narrative was wrapped around this love story between two people who were essentially, in their temperament, halves of the same person? In that sense, my writing is a what-if question that is born out of reading, and the fictional comes later.
I was also reading a lot of Jung, which took me to the ideas of archetypes, which took me to astrology.
How did you conceive the idea of astrology as being central to the work?
I think that it's important for a novel to have a belief system. Personally, I was very surprised in my research into astrology to discover how much psychological truth there is, and narrative truth. How much this series of symbols reflects and is reflected by all sorts of eras of history, all sorts of stories we know and love very well. The interplay between what we have projected to the heavens, and what the heavens have projected down onto us, was so robust, and so endlessly fascinating.
As a 12-part story, you can see the Zodiac in all sorts of narratives we have grown up with for tens of thousands of years. Starting with the first sign Aries, which is the object of truth, and moving away from that, coming right back around to the last sign, Pisces, which is to do with self-absorption and self-created truth. Most narratives can be patterned on this sequence. Or the idea, for example, that each of the quadrants of the zodiac, the four quarters, are each a perfect story ‒ that they involve an Aristotelian thesis, antithesis, and then a synthesis. It's been part of the language of our story-telling for as long as we know. But the astrology is not something I would ever use again, I think, in another literary context.
As an aside, I'm also interested in the degree to which people who don't like astrology get so angry, that their personality could have been determined by anybody but themselves. I find that very curious, I think that's quite a modern phenomenon, actually. We have become obsessed with the individual.
You have expressed frustration that people don’t place you within a larger literary tradition belonging to New Zealand. Who are some of the writers from your country that you’ve been most influenced by? And which other writers have impacted your work?
Janet Frame is the greatest New Zealand writer. She is utterly herself. Any one of her books could be published today and it would be ground-breaking. Elizabeth Knox was really important to me when I was growing up, and also the writer Maurice Gee.
But one of the greatest pleasures of writing the novel was writing New Zealand into the tradition of the 19th century novel. Katherine Mansfield was the first to really put the country on the world stage, and to my mind it is funny that it should be somebody writing in the modernist tradition.
I was also hugely excited to learn that Sarah Waters was going to be at this festival. Her book Fingersmith was a huge influence on The Luminaries - this idea of the book turning halfway on its head and the perspective entirely changing. I thought it was really masterful.
Having said that, I have to say that being an ambassador for my country when I feel that actually my country is not doing as much as it could - especially for the arts - is a slightly complicated position to be in. I think that New Zealand at the moment, like Australia, like Canada is in the hands of these neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, often very money-hungry politicians, who do not care about culture.
They care only about short-term gains, and they will destroy the planet in order to have the life they want. I'm very angry with my government, but very happy that I have this form with which to talk about this anger.
What is the experience of teaching creative writing in relation to the experience of writing?
The professions combine very well actually. You have to be alive to the reader's energy - when their attention is going to be flagging, when they're going to want less or more from you. And all of that is quite like designing a class. I find that teaching a forty-five minute lesson is similar to writing a paragraph: you have to shape it, you have to come in in a nice way, end in a nice way, be aware of the rhythms and the time passing.
Ideally, the project of creative writing is to just enlarge yourself. It's to end up with a bigger imagination, and a bigger heart, and a bigger brain, than you had when you began.
There’s a very easy way of separating the students who are committed from the students who are not committed. The committed students don't care how long it takes. They want to apprentice themselves. They want to be the best that they can be, and they want their best to be a level that keeps on receding from them. They treat it like a vocation. The students who are not committed want to make the minimum amount of effort, and get the maximum amount of results.
After the success of The Luminaries, how do you resist the huge pressure to produce more work?
I guess there is a certain kind of expectation now. I think I'm just really stubborn. I just tell them I'll do what I please! I went back to reading the complete plays of Shakespeare as a project this year. It's such good ego control - it's almost unbelievable that a person created these.
One thing that can happen to writers after their work has been acknowledged in a big way, is that they can become very easy on themselves, and indulgent. I'm so worried about that. I never want that to happen. And my way of trying to deal with that is just not go near writing until all of this noise recedes out of my life again.
It is also quite alienating. Even in this situation, I don't know anything about any of you. You're asking me questions, and we will leave without me knowing about your lives. And that's not the way a writer's life should work, it should be the other way around.
When you're on stage a lot, your own experience is what you're talking about again, and again, and again. It can be quite seductive; you can start thinking that you're quite important. And you need to remember as a writer that you're not important at all! It's what you give to your work, not what the audience gives to you.
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You've spoken about how reading is the biggest inspiration to your writing. What were you reading before you wrote The Luminaries?
In my reading life, there are two different types of reading I do. There's just reading for the love of it, and then there's reading imaginatively for when I've got an idea and a direction.
Before I wrote The Luminaries, I was reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou, which is hugely important to me. Particularly, this idea of a relationship between two human beings who are both strong enough in their selfhood to be able to look at somebody else, and apprehend them as a different soul.
And the process of reading imaginatively is to ask, "How could I make this work for me?" In the case of I and Thou I was thinking, could I write a novel where the entire narrative was wrapped around this love story between two people who were essentially, in their temperament, halves of the same person? In that sense, my writing is a what-if question that is born out of reading, and the fictional comes later.
I was also reading a lot of Jung, which took me to the ideas of archetypes, which took me to astrology.
How did you conceive the idea of astrology as being central to the work?
I think that it's important for a novel to have a belief system. Personally, I was very surprised in my research into astrology to discover how much psychological truth there is, and narrative truth. How much this series of symbols reflects and is reflected by all sorts of eras of history, all sorts of stories we know and love very well. The interplay between what we have projected to the heavens, and what the heavens have projected down onto us, was so robust, and so endlessly fascinating.
As a 12-part story, you can see the Zodiac in all sorts of narratives we have grown up with for tens of thousands of years. Starting with the first sign Aries, which is the object of truth, and moving away from that, coming right back around to the last sign, Pisces, which is to do with self-absorption and self-created truth. Most narratives can be patterned on this sequence. Or the idea, for example, that each of the quadrants of the zodiac, the four quarters, are each a perfect story ‒ that they involve an Aristotelian thesis, antithesis, and then a synthesis. It's been part of the language of our story-telling for as long as we know. But the astrology is not something I would ever use again, I think, in another literary context.
As an aside, I'm also interested in the degree to which people who don't like astrology get so angry, that their personality could have been determined by anybody but themselves. I find that very curious, I think that's quite a modern phenomenon, actually. We have become obsessed with the individual.
You have expressed frustration that people don’t place you within a larger literary tradition belonging to New Zealand. Who are some of the writers from your country that you’ve been most influenced by? And which other writers have impacted your work?
Janet Frame is the greatest New Zealand writer. She is utterly herself. Any one of her books could be published today and it would be ground-breaking. Elizabeth Knox was really important to me when I was growing up, and also the writer Maurice Gee.
But one of the greatest pleasures of writing the novel was writing New Zealand into the tradition of the 19th century novel. Katherine Mansfield was the first to really put the country on the world stage, and to my mind it is funny that it should be somebody writing in the modernist tradition.
I was also hugely excited to learn that Sarah Waters was going to be at this festival. Her book Fingersmith was a huge influence on The Luminaries - this idea of the book turning halfway on its head and the perspective entirely changing. I thought it was really masterful.
Having said that, I have to say that being an ambassador for my country when I feel that actually my country is not doing as much as it could - especially for the arts - is a slightly complicated position to be in. I think that New Zealand at the moment, like Australia, like Canada is in the hands of these neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, often very money-hungry politicians, who do not care about culture.
They care only about short-term gains, and they will destroy the planet in order to have the life they want. I'm very angry with my government, but very happy that I have this form with which to talk about this anger.
What is the experience of teaching creative writing in relation to the experience of writing?
The professions combine very well actually. You have to be alive to the reader's energy - when their attention is going to be flagging, when they're going to want less or more from you. And all of that is quite like designing a class. I find that teaching a forty-five minute lesson is similar to writing a paragraph: you have to shape it, you have to come in in a nice way, end in a nice way, be aware of the rhythms and the time passing.
Ideally, the project of creative writing is to just enlarge yourself. It's to end up with a bigger imagination, and a bigger heart, and a bigger brain, than you had when you began.
There’s a very easy way of separating the students who are committed from the students who are not committed. The committed students don't care how long it takes. They want to apprentice themselves. They want to be the best that they can be, and they want their best to be a level that keeps on receding from them. They treat it like a vocation. The students who are not committed want to make the minimum amount of effort, and get the maximum amount of results.
After the success of The Luminaries, how do you resist the huge pressure to produce more work?
I guess there is a certain kind of expectation now. I think I'm just really stubborn. I just tell them I'll do what I please! I went back to reading the complete plays of Shakespeare as a project this year. It's such good ego control - it's almost unbelievable that a person created these.
One thing that can happen to writers after their work has been acknowledged in a big way, is that they can become very easy on themselves, and indulgent. I'm so worried about that. I never want that to happen. And my way of trying to deal with that is just not go near writing until all of this noise recedes out of my life again.
It is also quite alienating. Even in this situation, I don't know anything about any of you. You're asking me questions, and we will leave without me knowing about your lives. And that's not the way a writer's life should work, it should be the other way around.
When you're on stage a lot, your own experience is what you're talking about again, and again, and again. It can be quite seductive; you can start thinking that you're quite important. And you need to remember as a writer that you're not important at all! It's what you give to your work, not what the audience gives to you.
