It has been 10 years since Eleanor Catton became, at 28, the youngest writer to be awarded the Booker prize. The Luminaries, a Victorian mystery set during the New Zealand gold rush, was the longest book to win in the prize’s history and made her only the second New Zealand writer to have done so, after Keri Hulme. Since then, she has adapted it for the BBC and written a screenplay for Emma (both of which aired in 2020), got married and had a baby. But it has taken her a long time to get back to fiction, she says, when I visit her at home in Cambridge, where she is living with her husband, the American poet Steven Toussaint, as he studies for a PhD in divinity and philosophy of religion at the university.
“The Booker prize was life-changing, but it wasn’t self-changing,” she says. “Having a child is truly self-changing.” They have just returned from a trip to Auckland, her first visit home since the pandemic, and the first time her parents had met her two-year-old daughter. By coincidence, on the day we meet Jacinda Ardern announces she will be stepping down as prime minister of New Zealand. While Catton has been a fan, she says, she took the closing of her home country’s borders at the peak of the pandemic “kind of personally”. As Catton points out, when Ardern thanked her “team of five million” New Zealanders for the sacrifices they were making during lockdown, she failed to include all those who were stuck overseas, like Catton, who had just moved to the UK, “and who were also making an incredible sacrifice. They were a part of that team, but they weren’t honoured as such.”
