Catton: Man Booker Prize 2013

Eleanor Catton with her award © TheManBookerPrizes

Congratulations to Eleanor Catton for winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for 2013 for her novel The Luminaries! The 28-year-old Canadian-born New Zealand writer is the youngest ever to win this prestigious literary prize – what an achievement!

Robert Macfarlane, the chair of the judging panel called the book a "dazzling work, luminous, vast". He also said that it was "a book you sometimes feel lost in, fearing it to be 'a big baggy monster', but it turns out to be as tightly structured as an orrery".

Selected from 151 submissions, whittled down to a long list of 13 titles and further narrowed to a shortlist of six novels, The Luminaries is set in a small town in New Zealand amid the gold rush of the mid-1950s. It's got mystery, the planets and the zodiac - sounds like a most intriguing combination that can't lose. A foreword: it's quite long at over 800 pages, but if you're a true book lover, length will not stop you.

The cover © TheManBookerPrizes

• Read a review of The Luminaries by Andrew Riemer, chief book reviewer for the Herald.
• If you like what you read, then buy The Luminaries now!

Catton received her £50,000 prize from the Duchess of Cornwall at a glittering ceremony at the Guildhall in London. 

The Man Booker Prize is awarded annually for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland or Zimbabwe.

The award © TheManBookerPrizes

There is some controversy there, with the trustees of the Booker Prize Foundation changing the rules to include authors from anywhere in the world, as long as the works are written in English and published in the UK. This comes to effect from 2014 onwards. Their reasoning: "We are embracing the freedom of English in all its vigour, its vitality, its versatility and its glory wherever it may be. We are abandoning the constraints of geography and national boundaries."