The Luminaries

I am reading The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton; she won the Man Booker Prize for it in 2013 and she is twenty-eight, yes 28 years old! The Luminaries is a very long novel, 848 pages long and set in New Zealand in 1866, and as far as I have read it is about a young man who goes to the gold fields in search of his fortune. So far I am really enjoying it, and it truly deserves the excellent reviews it has received, and the general acclaim.

However, what strikes me is that she could not possibly have written this book without a huge amount of research, historical, geographical and literary, and must have taken her an enormous amount of time… just to physically write it, without all the reading. When I was her age I had to work… All through my writing life, up until three years ago, I have had to work at a day job and try and squeeze writing in around it; I was mostly a teacher but i did other things too. Then I had a family… I always kept writing, but it is only now I am free can I devote my life, my every day, to writing.

Eleanor studied English at the University of Canterbury, then took an MA at the  Victoria University of Wellington. In 2008, when she was twenty-three,  she was awarded a fellowship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and in 2011, she was the writer in residence at the back at the University of Canterbury. She must indeed have shown her writing promise early, but I am struck by the fact that when I took my degree there was no such thing as writing studies, and although I did a masters, it was while I was working, and was twenty years after I took my first degree. I am not envious (really I’m not) because she has an amazing talent, and I am sure she will show us just how much in future publications, but it does strike me how different things are now!

Oh well, back to my current novel!