The 2013 Booker Prize was won by Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries.The youngest winner at 28 crafts the longest winning book. Her novel is an intricate 832-page Victorian – in both timeframe and scale – epic.

Catton’s tale of love, greed and murder during the 19th-century gold rush on New Zealand’s west coast was structured around the signs of the zodiac. And, as if it were written in the stars, she became the second Kiwi to win the prize after Keri Hulme, whose victory came in 1985, the year of Catton’s birth.

The huge sales of The Luminaries proved a gold rush for the author whose post-win life was subsumed by writing the scripts for the television mini-series of the novel.
 

By
Eleanor Catton
Published by
Granta
Won the 2013 Booker Prize. Eleanor Catton’s fiendishly clever novel is both a ghost story and gripping mystery, it richly evokes a mid-19th century world of goldrush boom and bust.

The shortlist

The Luminaries
Prize winner
Harvest
The Lowland
The Testament of Mary

The longlist

The 2013 judges