Literary Birthday – 24 September – Eleanor Catton

Happy Birthday, Eleanor Catton, born on 24 September 1985.

Eleanor Catton Quotes

1. Teaching is a great complement to writing. It’s very social and gets you out of your own head. It’s also very optimistic. It renews itself every year – it’s a renewable resource.
2. I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.
3. Writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
4. When I was writing The Luminaries, I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, ‘Ah! I didn’t know that was coming!’
5. I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.
6. I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you’re going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.
7. What I like about fiction most is that it resists closure and exists, if the reader is willing to engage, as a possible encounter – an encounter that is like meeting a human being.
8. I think that’s what fiction writing is actually all about. It’s about trying to solve problems in creative ways.
9. I believe really strongly in imitation, actually: I think it’s the first place you need to go to if you’re going to be able to understand how something works. True mimicry is actually quite difficult.
10. In principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea – an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.
11. The illusion of depth in a character is created simply by withholding information from an audience. A character will seem complex and intriguing only if we don’t know the reasons why.
12. Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.

Eleanor Catton is a New Zealand author of literary fiction. She completed a master’s degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her award-winning debut novel, The Rehearsal, written as her Master’s thesis, was published in 2008, and has been adapted into a 2016 film of the same name. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize. In the 2014 New Year Honours, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature. Catton’s third novel, Birnam Wood, was published in February 2023. Her novels explore themes of ambition, human agency, morality, and the relationship between individuals and their environment.

Source for Image: NZatFrankfurt, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eleanor_Catton.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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