Eleanor Catton wins Canadian Governor General's Literary Award 2013

Congratulations to Eleanor Catton on winning the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.

In her acceptance speech for the prestigious prize, Catton said that a great deal had been written on the subject of immigrant fiction, but less on the subject of emigrant fiction.

"Stories that face outward rather than inward, stories that travel from a place, rather than to a place. But of course every immigrant is also an emigrant, just as every writer must balance writing into a literary tradition and writing out of one. The Luminaries is set in New Zealand, but borrows its style from the European novels of the nineteenth century, and its plot from American, Australian, British, and Canadian novels of the twentieth; it has been shaped and inspired, as I have been, by literature and literary traditions from around the world. To call the book a New Zealand novel feels as uncomfortable to me as to call it women’s fiction: a novel, after all, has no passport, and a reader does not need one. I believe that a healthy national literature is one with an open immigration policy, and I feel very moved to have received this great honour from the country of my birth."

The jury for the GGs had this to say about The Luminaries:
“The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton is an entire narrative universe with its own mysterious cosmology. This exhilarating feat of literary design dazzles with masterful storytelling. Each character is a planet – complex and brilliantly revealed. Precise sensual prose illuminates greed, fear, jealousy, longing – all that it means to be human.”
– Jury citation,  Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction

'I think I am becoming a New Zealander': Letters of J.C. Beaglehole

On Thursday evening we launched 'I think I am becoming a New Zealander': Letters of J.C. Beaglehole, chosen and edited by Tim Beaglehole, at the Alexander Turnbull Library. David Mackay has kindly given us his launch speech to use here.

Author Tim Beaglehole hands over J.C. Beaglehole's letters to Chris Szekely, Chief Librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library

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I first want to congratulate VUP on what has been a stellar year and even a pretty impressive week with three book launches.  This in particular is a publication of which the Press can be proud.  It is a fine production that is handsomely designed with a page layout and type face which echoes that of the Cook Journals themselves. With his passion for typography and printing I believe that JCB, would have been very pleased with the result.

Some of the letters on display at the Alexander Turnbull Library

In August 1970 I was a research assistant in London when I received a aerogramme from JCB asking me to find a letter from Canon Douglas, the first editor of Cook’s second and third voyage journals.  The letter, dated 4 January 1770, was in the Egerton collection in the Manuscripts Room of the BM and I copied it out, did a fair impression of Cook’s signature at the end, and posted it to Wellington.

I received a thank you note a couple of months later with the following: “Your copy of the letter was admirable, & your forgery of Cook’s signature not bad at all.  With a little practice & the right ink and paper you should be able to make quite a useful supplement to your lecturer’s salary.  Yes, please will you get the BM to send me a photo-copy, as I have all the others, & as I may as well give a complete set to the Turnbull, to which I turn over all my rubbish”.

Now there are a few of things I wish to say about this.  First it is a pleasure and a privilege to be asked to launch this fine book in the institution in which John spent so much time, to which he was so affectionately attached and where much of his rubbish is now stored.

Second, having seen in these letters how frantically busy he was in the five years before his death, and how many demands there were on his time, I am amazed that he was still able to find the time to read prospective journal articles for a PhD student and give distant advice on publishing as he did for me. But there were also many others.

Third, his suggestion that I might consider secondary employment as a forger is typical of the good-natured irony that populates the letters to colleagues and friends. It was a little less worrying than the suggestion made to me five years earlier by one of his VUW colleagues when I was a wine waiter at Tim and Helen’s engagement party. If all else failed, said the colleague, I at least had a career to fall back on. As I was doing a third year paper with that particular staff member this was more ominous than JCB’s suggested career option that had higher income potential & seemed more skilled.  I didn’t actually fail but it was a near run thing. Imagine my pleasure then, almost 50 years later to find JCB’s observation on this colleague in a letter to London:  “…some of the things he did in examining would make your hair stand on end…”.

JCB’s letter also brings me to the medium itself. Today of course all such communication would be by email or Facebook and – the historian’s nightmare  - many fewer would survive.  Who neatly sorts and files their emails today? The likelihood is that we would have to go to the NSA or some such body and say, “You remember that email I sent to Tim Beaglehole in 2005?  Could you send me a copy?”

These letters highlight other losses. Some to me were on aerogrammes but others were not. His wife Elsie, presumably aware of the pressure on his precious time while he was in London in 1950, urged him to write on letterforms, the precursor of aerogrammes. However this was generally too confining. It restricted the flow of prose; imposing an economy that intruded on both style and narrative. Most of the letters in this collection, especially those to friends are generous, expansive, covering a great array of subjects of mutual interest. How many of us today write emails, let alone letters to friends, that range over such a broad range of topics? Emails also cripple our prose into inelegant forms and reduce the scope and depth of our conversations.

By contrast these letters are, of course, wonderful works of prose. While the letter structures don’t suggest planning, or drafts, or an eye to posterity, they are to a degree self-conscious and JCB’s literary tastes clearly informed the style.  As you would expect, the particular tone varied according to the recipient and changed a little over time.  There is a sort of deliberate “boys own” quality in letters to his mother when he was a student in London in the twenties.  With longstanding women friends, such as Kathleen McKay and Helen Wallis, there is a kind of flirtatious style. Rich ironies and a mock baroque form is characteristic in letters to old friends such Ian Henning and his WEA colleague Norman Richmond. 

To Averil Lysaght, who assisted with the zoological annotations on the journals, deep sighs of tolerance and restraint are apparent in every line. Averil was a fellow Victoria College student who moved to London in the 1930’s. While an able scientist she was also delightfully batty and in particular had an extensive demonology of scoundrel academics who had pilfered, plundered and plagiarised their way to success on the shoulders of more virtuous and honourable scholars. Any associate with such villains was to be condemned and JCB often had to plot a difficult path.

One’s reaction to the letters in this volume will be shaped by the degree of proximity to their author. Family, those who knew him, those who know him only through his works or those who know nothing about him at all will take different things from the book. I am sure that reviewers who fall into the latter category will be astounded by the range of his contacts, the scope of his activities and the quite extraordinary contribution to New Zealand cultural and intellectual life over more than 4 decades. I predict that they will also be entranced by experiencing a literary form that has all but died out.

I must say that as someone who knew him only as a student as I read the letters I often had the slightly uneasy feeling of intruding into the private life of a person I only knew at a distance – almost as though I had broken the appropriate level of formality separating student and teacher. I believe we will all read these letters in different ways and find different little things to fascinate. As an historian aware of the high benchmark that the Cook Journals set into terms of scholarly research editing and annotation, I was fascinated to see the agonising and painstaking work that went into decisions about some of the smallest details of annotation, citation and punctuation.  The letters to RA Skelton in the 1950’s document the effort that went in to getting the first volume right, since it set the form the others would follow.

I’m not sure how large the corpus of letters was from which Tim had to make his selection. It wouldn’t be in his character to leave out any decent gossip or the occasional barbed jab at this idiot or that. It is a finely edited, discriminating edition with great insight into NZ cultural life, nationality, family life in mid-decades of last century and work on the great life task. It stands as a proper companion volume to the 2006 biography but also as one person’s perspective on mid-C20th New Zealand.

The sur-title of the book opens up another dimension. In a letter to Ida Leeson on 18 November 1946 he wrote, “I don’t know how to put this without a terrific lot of explanation, but I think I am becoming a New Zealander.” This appears to be in response to an attempt to get JCB to move to a chair at ANU. It marked a turning point and subsequent attempts to lure him away to Chairs overseas were unsuccessful.  Given his attachment to England, his difficulties in finding or holding a permanent position in NZ in the early 1930’s, his outrage at civil liberties abuses in the 1920’s, 1930s and 1940’s, not to mention some acts of cultural and architectural vandalism this was a fascinating decision.

He did give some explanations to Ida Leeson. By 1946 he was more optimistic about where NZ was heading in terms of art, culture and even government policy. It seemed to have a better idea of its place in the world following the war and was evolving a sustainable and consistent foreign policy. In other letters, love of the NZ landscape and other attachments became clear.

Was there also a sense that, angry, indignant or disgusted though he may have been at some aspects of life here, he had by this time – in modern management terms – begun to own the problems or feel some sort of shame or embarrassment about them?  There were also things in England that angered him, but it was possible to distance himself from these as being the responsibility of others. Would he in England have bothered to write to newspapers about censorship and civil liberties, to the Vice Chancellor of a university about an ugly wall outside Robert Stout building or have devoted so much time to tasks such as saving old St Pauls from the ravages of an Archbishop?

These letters are a rich resource, covering an extraordinary range of topics. The  history of NZ Universities and of Victoria University of Wellington; the evolution of Historical Branch; the significant impact of the WEA on NZ cultural and intellectual life. (I particularly enjoyed the rebellion in  a class in Hampden in Otago in 1930 when one attendee said he wasn’t interested in political science or fascism and why couldn’t they have some lectures on Galsworthy instead, so they had a vote). There are many glimpses of family life and I enjoyed the nice image of Tim strolling down Karori Rd with pet white rats draped all over him. There is a significant amount of material on art, music, literature and architecture.

The concern for civil liberties is also strong and the letters portray the official fears for the left in the 20s, 30’s and 40’s. The analogy with disease is striking. The threat was contagious and literature, lectures, film and even art were the vectors. If one couldn’t understand it that made it doubly insidious and was a sure sign of seditious intention. After a showing at the Film Society of The Russian Road to Life in 1932, the Police turned up the next morning to get a full list of members from the Society secretary. JCB thought it a great joke.

And there are curiosities here. We will all find our own. Perhaps it is the historian in me but Why oh Why in October 1929 in a letter written to his father on the SS Osterley in the English Channel on his way home to NZ, did he start using roman numerals for the months in the dating of letters? This form seemed to be confined to family and friends and it was last used in December 1941 in a letter to his old friend Norman Richmond. Was there significance in its targeted use? Tim may know. Was this some homage to writers he admired – Horace Walpole, Henry James or Harold Lasky?  I haven’t had time to find out. Is there some semiotic puzzle here to be unravelled? And did the tradition died out altogether in 1941? After December 1941 dates are absolutely standardised in form – 7 November 2013 – with one exception. In a letter to Janet Paul in 1967 – a more rushed letter than was characteristic - the date reads “1 November Oh God! 1967”.

This brings me to another curiosity and perhaps again it is one which an historian might be drawn to: the salutations and valedictions in letters. Perhaps spending any time in England with its finer appreciation of form and class creates this sensibility.  My own supervisor in London – a former spitfire pilot during the war and one who indulged – in JCB’s words – in “that Namierite tripe”, always addressed me as Mackay, up until that exact point when I passed my oral examination after which I became David. 

How much more formal it all must have been in London shortly after the First World War. But if you are studying the eighteenth century, and your hero signs himself – as Cook did in that letter I referred to at the beginning “I am with great esteem Dr Sr your humble Servt/ Jams Cook”, is this an occupational hazard or something bound to create ambivalence?

Let’s briefly look at a few and I will begin with the valedictions. “With love”; just “Jack”; “with much love”; “with love to all” (all to the family).  “Yours sincerely”; “Yours faithfully”; “We are Sir, Yours faithfully, JC Beaglehole, N.M Richmond”, to the Auckland Star and  Herald; or “I am, etc., J.C. Beaglehole” to the Evening Post.

So far, so good. But then what do we make of  J.C. McBeaglehole” to R.M. Campbell; “Yours in the Lord”, to Campbell in 1927; ‘With a married man’s love Yours in the Lord, JCB”, to Kathleen McKay in 1930; “Yours in His benediction” to Ian Henning in 1932, and these last from an agnostic who disappointed his future in-laws by insisting on marriage in a Registry Office.

Then “J.C. Beaglehole MA. (NZ) Ph.D.(Lond) Senior Lecturer in History, Victoria University College” to niece Mary on her 21^st. I’ll return to this one. “Yours (in the English fashion) ever, John Beaglehole”; “Best wishes: indeed very best wishes”, to Helen Wallis; and again “I salute you, with much love,” to whom also signed one letter “Le Comte de Beaglehole”. These are partly I am sure the colonial gently knocking the formalities of the old society.

With the salutations something else begins to creep in.;  “My Dear Mummy”; “Dear Daddy”; “My Dear Elsie”; Dear one”.  So far so good. – family again  Then “Honoured Sir” to friend F.A. de la Mare; “My dear, my charming Miss McKay”, to Kathleen Mackay in 1934: “Dear delinquent”, to Helen Wallis in 1963.  All these are jocular if inventive addresses to friends. 

That letter to his niece Mary in January 1948 has another element:  “My dear Neece Nie Nei (crossed out); My dear (crossed out); and eventually, My deer Neece.  Of course there is fun in this but also the slight uncertainty about how an uncle should address a niece of that age.  In the changed society after the Second World War what were the appropriate modes of address and relationships to people?

Twenty years later this uncertainty broadens. In a letter from London to Tim and Helen in June 1966 he writes, ‘”I have been reading the Observer & finding it more & more impossible to understand anything about anything…”.  A little later to Mary Boyd, “(England) is no less of a madhouse, & the whole world totally incomprehensible”. In June 1968 to Janet Paul; “I am tempted to say God what a world it is….”.

The last letter of 7 April 1971 is to the artist Bill Sutton, commissioned by the University to do a portrait of JCB on receiving the OM.  He was a very reluctant sitter, thinking the whole enterprise unnecessary. The salutation goes:

“ Dear Bill

    “  Mr Sutton

    “   Sutton

    “  Bill Sutton

and the first line reads, “God knows how I am supposed to address people in the present state of  civilization in N.Z.” In the more ordered world of James Cook, “Your humble obedient servant” would have done just fine.

It gives me great pleasure to launch this book, to congratulate Tim and Fergus again and advise you all to buy it. I hope you will enjoy it, as I did.

'I've been singing Royals to my cats for weeks' - Eleanor Catton sings

Eleanor Catton (right) with her partner Steve Toussaint (left)

Eleanor Catton has had a whirlwind week since she won the Man Booker Prize 2013 for her novel, The Luminaries. She accepted the prize from Camilla Parker Bowles in London’s Guildhall, partied into the small hours in the fashionable Two Brydges, and did a straight thirteen-hour day of interviews after two hours sleep. She is currently in Canada, attending writers’ festivals in Banff, Vancouver and Toronto.

New Zealand sales have sky-rocketed. Victoria University Press haven’t had a copy in the warehouse since publication. Every reprint has been sold out before delivery, and total orders are now over 30,000. Ebook sales have hit an unprecedented – for New Zealand – 4025, an intriguing figure given the number of wrist-strain jokes.

The Luminaries has got New Zealand booksellers excited. Tilly Lloyd, the owner of Unity Books in Wellington said that the Man Booker Prize produces huge sales, but sales for The Luminaries were 'astronomical'. 

"The Luminaries had springs right from its Wellington launch and has broken all our sales records. People have poured in the doors for it. We’re totally proud of Eleanor Catton, VUP and the IIML, but it’s a big coat-tails moment for all of us in the NZ book industry," said Ms Lloyd. 

Steve Toussaint holds a big book

Since its publication in August, the recurring comment from readers has been that The Luminaries is large, yet, even before the Man Booker Prize announcement, the novel was selling well. We asked Eleanor why she thinks in our apparently time-poor age, people were still drawn to long novels.

"I think that people often turn to literature to escape the condition of their daily life, rather than to see it repeated or echoed. I certainly wouldn't want to read a novel composed of tweets, or advertisements, or emails; I'd much prefer to read something enlarging, something contrasting, something new. 

Actually I don't think that the balance is shifting one way or another. There have always been long books and short books. Long novels can offer pleasures that shorter novels can't—a fuller immersion, for a start, but also a bigger promise, a more serious contract between the writer and the reader—but as with every aspect of fiction, these are qualities that need to be earned. My belief is that every novel has its spirit level: the length that it deserves to be."

In the same 24 hours that Eleanor took the top prize in London, she shared the headlines with Lorde who won the top prize at New Zealand's Silver Scroll Awards. (We won’t mention the third headline act of last week.) Much has been made of the ages of these two high-achieving women, and we asked Eleanor what she thought of all the fuss.

“Age and gender are bound up together, and it's quite hard to look at one aspect without looking at the other: when discussed by the media, I'm a young woman rather than a youth. I'm proud to think that young women's sense of what is possible might be enlarged by the story of The Luminaries, but I'd also be proud to think that about any reader, whatever their age, gender, and background. Biography has to do with the artist rather than the art, and I'm more interested in the art. Lorde is a fantastic lyricist and she writes top-notch pop songs. I've been singing ‘Royals’ to my cats for weeks.”

The Luminaries is a finalist in Canada’s $25,000 Governor General’s English-language fiction prize, which is announced on November 13 in Toronto.
 

Eleanor Catton after 12 hours of interviews following her Man Booker win last Wednesday

Letter to all booksellers from VUP

A letter to booksellers about the extraordinary success of The Luminaries

 

Dear friends,

 

Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize success is the biggest thing that has happened for VUP. We are overjoyed for her, and thrilled by the support she and we have received from the New Zealand book trade, and by the gusto with which NZ readers are now embracing The Luminaries.

 

It is hard to be prepared for an extraordinary event like this, especially when one of the charming features of the Man Booker Prize is that the judges make their decision on the day and the publisher gets no warning at all. We have been as surprised as everyone else by just how fast this is taking off, and we are doing our very best to resupply everyone as quickly as possible.

 

The next reprint of 10,000 copies is being airfreighted from Australia and is due at Random House NZ on 29 October. As many of you know, it is oversubscribed, and I am afraid we will have to part-fulfil many of your orders.

 

The next reprint of 20,000 is already underway. We don’t have a firm date yet, but we are optimistic that the further wait will not be much longer than a week.

 

We are very grateful for your support – as we are for the support of Random House NZ, Allen & Unwin Australia, Book Systems International and Archetype Book Agents – and we will keep you updated as soon as we have further news.

 

Happy days!

 

Fergus Barrowman

Publisher VUP

And the winner is...

We have been shaking with excitement all morning here at VUP at the news that Eleanor Catton has won the Man Booker Prize 2013. The Luminaries is a book we are proud to have published and we wish Ellie all the best for the next few, we imagine, dizzying months ahead. You can hear her speaking with Nine to Noon's Kathryn Ryan here. Tim Wilson of Seven Sharp talked to Ellie before she left for the UK and you can watch that story here.

Ellie spoke earlier about some of the research that went on behind The Luminaries:

'The Woman in White, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, and Anna Karenina were hugely influential, some for reasons of character, some for reasons of plot, and some for reasons of style. My nonfiction research was a little more scattered. I read a few books on New Zealand history, and West Coast history in particular, but by far the most helpful non-fictional resource was the National Library of New Zealand’s newspaper archives, which has digital copies of every edition of the West Coast Times, the Lyttelton Times, and the Otago Witness, among a great many other newspapers and periodicals. I was able to see how much everything cost; what kinds of foods and wares were available to buy and sell; what entertainments were on offer; and, most importantly for The Luminaries, I was able to read transcripts of actual court trials from the period. The trials are extraordinarily vivid in their detail: I recall a man sentenced to death by hanging, shouting from the dock, ‘I have in me three hearts and my father knows it.’ That line gives me chills.'

The National Library is a treasure indeed.

And here is Ellie's full (and generous) acceptance speech:

"Thank you. When I began writing The Luminaries, I was very much in the thrall of Lewis Hyde's wonderful book, The Gift, as I still am. And his conception of the creative enterprise as explored in that book was very important to me in how I came to understand the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, during the years of the gold rush.

The region is rich in two very different minerals, gold, prized by Europeans for its value, and greenstone or pounamu, prized by Maori for its worth. Gold being pure currency, can only be bought and sold. Pounamu as a symbol of belonging and prestige, can only be given. An economy based on value, in Lewis Hyde's conception, is not necessarily inferior to an economy based on worth, but the two must somehow be reconciled in the life of an artist who wishes to make a living by his or her gift, by his or her art.

On the West Coast, this intersection of economies has a national significance, speaking as it does to New Zealand's essentially bicultural heart. I am very aware of the pressures upon contemporary publishing to make money and to remain competitive in a competitive world, and I know that it is no small thing that my primary publishers, Granta, here in London, and Victoria University Press in New Zealand, never once made these pressures known to me while I was writing this book. I was free throughout to concern myself of questions not of value, but of worth.

This is all the more incredible to me because The Luminaries is and was from the very beginning, a publisher's nightmare. The shape and form of the book made certain kinds of editorial suggestions not only mathematically impossible, but even more egregious, astrologically impossible. A very sensible email from one of my two editors, Sarah Holloway or Max Porter, might have even earned the very annoying and not at all sensible reply, 'well you would think that, being a virgo'. I am extraordinarily fortunate to have found a home at these publishing houses and to have found friends and colleagues and people who have managed to strike an elegant balance between making art and making money.
To everybody at Granta and at Victoria University Press back home, thank you.

I would also like to make some very brief but heartfelt individual thanks. To my editors, Sarah Holloway and Max Porter, whose influence on The Luminaries has been conspiratorial, rigorous, and for me, incredibly personally sustaining. To my publishers Fergus Barrowman, Philip Gwyn Jones and Sigrid Rausing, who were kind enough to take a chance on me. And to my dear agent Caroline Dawnay in whom I trust completely. I must also thank my beloved, Steve Toussaint, whose kindness, patience and love is written on every page of my book.

Lastly I would like to thank the Man Booker Prize and this year's judging panel for considering my work alongside the work of such wonderful and important writers as NoViolet Bulawayo, Jim Crace, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruth Ozeki, and Colm Toibin, and also for providing the value and the worth, jointly, of this extraordinary prize. Thank you."

ENDS

Imaginary landscapes – heading to Hawthornden Castle

Lynn Davidson reports from her recent literary travels

I’ve been to two writing festivals in the past month – the first was the Byron Bay Writers Festival which I went to with my son Elliot and his partner Cat, and then on my own among the throngs to the Edinburgh Festival(s) – International/Book/Fringe. At the Byron Bay Writers Festival you bought a ticket for a whole day and got a rubber wrist band to wear. With the sun shining on softly billowing marquees and silky rainbow flags you kind of felt like you were at a music festival – and then you were. We went to a love poetry session chaired by Mark Tredinnick who described poetry as ‘an architecture of utterance’. Performance poets read their own work: C J Bowerbird read a performance poem about the gritty side of love while raucous birds added some background screech. When Kelly-Lee Hickey read Cohen’s love poem ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’ the white tent seemed to hold its breath until the end of the poem.

A session with M J Hyland was lively (she used the ‘c word’ about a reviewer who had been less than kind) and generously full of tips about her process. She not only gets friends who are good readers to read her work; she asks them after about a month what they remember of the novel and what they think the centre of the novel is. Personally I think it would be scary to get a surprise pop quiz by MJ a month down the track after reading her work … what if you’d forgotten the gist of it! Horrors. She also meditates for half an hour each morning, which includes slumping in a chair with cigarette and coffee before heading into her writing day. Generally I like hearing the Aussie writers talk, they have a certain appealing zest and irreverence.

Highlights for me of the busy, vast Edinburgh Book Fest (and I’ll add here I wasn’t there to hear Ellie Catton read – I heard she was wonderful) were Kay Ryan, Jackie Kay, Kathleen Jamie and the great story-teller Colm Toibin. Kay Ryan talked about the importance of ‘getting going’ with writing; she says if you can get going, something can happen. She often uses Ripley’s Believe it or Not and murder mysteries as inspiration. She was funny and wry and generous with her readings. Her asides – pre, mid and post poem reading – were almost poems in themselves. One memorable quote: ‘I like the texture and the sound of facts but I don’t care about them actually.’  How liberating.

Kathleen Jamie talked a bit about what she called the ‘hinterlands’ of poems  – I think she means the land you can’t see when you look at the landscape of a poem, but it’s there. She spoke about her recent breast cancer and how, during her recovery where she spent a long time relaxing in her garden, a friend sent her some rose-scented body moisturiser and how lovely the scent was, and then she talked about the scent of Damascus roses and she wove around to Rosa Luxemburg and I almost forget now, but maybe she was really talking about a prose poem, ‘Healings 2’, in her new collaborative book Frissure where artist Brigid Collins paints the line of Jamie’s mastectomy scar as a rose with a line of Robert Burns falling off the edges of the page: ‘You sieze the flo’er, the bloom is shed.’ The poem finishes ‘To be healed is not to be saved from mortality but rather, released back into it:/ we are returned to the wild, into possibilities for ageing and change.’

So since then I’ve been to County Kerry in Ireland and my ex-sister in law has taken me around peninsulas and onto islands. Back in Scotland I spent some days on the Isle of Islay, revisiting after 27 years. It’s as beautiful and strange and as full of eccentric characters as it ever was. I ate a memorable meal there called Hebridean chicken with black pudding, haggis and whisky sauce.

It was on Islay that I heard about the death of Seamus Heaney. It’s hard to imagine that he is gone. I was going to hear him read at the British and Irish Contemporary Poetry Conference next week. At least the poems are still with us – we can enter them at any time and hear their music.  

Now I’m resident (for a short, heady time a fellow) at Hawthornden Castle and hope to spend my month here writing poems and perhaps essays that may have some interesting hinterlands. We went beneath the castle the other day to explore the Pictish caves. Our host Hamish unlocked the heavy wood door to the caves with a large old key. We all (except me) bowed down a little to enter caves that are like large burrows, rounded at their edges. At one point a cave opened onto the side of a very deep well (Seamus would have found a poem there). In another cave carved into its walls was what looked like an extensive wine rack, but was a dove cote. For doves. In the caves. You heard me.

The Luminaries makes short list for Man Booker Prize 2013

Eleanor Catton and Fergus Barrowman at The Luminaries Auckland launch, August 2013

Victoria University Press is thrilled at the announcement that Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries has made the short list of just six books for the prestigious Man Booker Prize 2013 announced today in London.

Speaking from the UK where she is on a promotional tour, Ms Catton said, ‘I am proud that this shortlist will mean many more people around the world will have a chance to visit New Zealand, imaginatively speaking, and spend awhile in our historical past. I think that New Zealand literature is in a very strong place right now­–I'm especially excited about the writers of my generation–and I am happy that, whatever the outcome of the prize, the shortlisting will help to raise the profile of New Zealand literature elsewhere.’

Ms Catton’s New Zealand publisher, Fergus Barrowman of Victoria University Press said, ‘‘I love this book and I’m very happy that so many more readers will now discover the pleasures it has to offer them.’

The Luminaries, a nineteenth century West Coast gold-rush murder story with twenty part cast and a richly patterned structure, has been receiving glowing reviews internationally and in New Zealand. The Guardian review called the novel ‘a dazzling feat of a novel, the golden nugget in this year's Man Booker long list.' 

The Man Booker Prize 2013 is announced in London on 15 October. "I've never attended a black tie event before,’ said Ms Catton. ‘I'll have to buy a frock."

The Luminaries was published by Victoria University Press in August 2013.