Autor da Semana Eleanor Catton

[Spartaco]

Eleanor Catton
​

Eleanor Catton é uma escritora neozelandesa nascida no Canadá em 1985 (Ontario, 24 de setembro de 1985) enquanto seu pai completava seu doutorado em uma universidade canadense. Catton cresceu em Christchurch após o retorno de sua família para Nova Zelândia quando ela tinha seis anos. Ela formou-se em Inglês na Universidade de Canterbury e completou um mestrado em Escrita Criativa no The Institute of Modern Letters da Universidade Victoria, em Wellington e foi bolsista do Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Seu primeiro romance, The Rehearsal, de 2008 (lançado no Brasil como O Ensaio) foi bem recebido e incluído na "shortlist" para as premiações do Guardian First Book Award e Dylan Thomas Prize e também na "longlist" do Orange Prize. Segundo romance de Catton, The Luminaries (Os Luminares), foi publicado em 2013.

Ele foi indicado e, posteriormente, ganhou o Man Booker Prize desse mesmo ano, tornando-se a mais jovem vencedora dessa premiação, com a idade de 28 anos. Além disso, deve-se destacar que Os luminares é o trabalho mais longo a ganhar o referido prêmio em sua história (45 anos).

Seus dois livros foram muito bem recebidos pela crítica internacional, que a considera um dos grandes novos talentos literários de sua geração.

Atualmente Catton vive em Auckland com seu companheiro, Steven Toussaint, autor e poeta norte-americano, e ensina escrita criativa no Instituto de Tecnologia de Manukau.

Neste ano, Catton tornou-se membro da Ordem do Mérito da Nova Zelândia por seus serviços à literatura.


Os Luminares
Em 2013, o anúncio do vencedor do Man Booker Prize incluiu a notícia da quebra de dois paradigmas importantes. Aos 28 anos, a neozelandesa Eleanor Catton se tornou a autora mais jovem a conquistar o prêmio. Os luminares, seu segundo livro, é o romance mais longo já contemplado. A escrita de Catton é mais madura do que sua idade pode sugerir. A extensão da história não a torna maçante.

Catton constrói uma trama de intrigas ambientada na Nova Zelândia da segunda metade do século XIX. Diagramas astrológicos abrem cada uma das partes do romance, o que permite que os eventos sejam encaminhados a partir das posições estelares e planetárias ali determinadas. Uns poucos personagens (cada um associado a um corpo celeste) estão diretamente envolvidos com os acontecimentos centrais da trama. Do lado de fora do círculo - mais próximos do leitor, mas desempenhando papéis mais ou menos secundários no drama principal, estão doze homens (cada um associado a um signo zodiacal) que interferem, movidos por diferentes razões, na história em curso.

Essa maneira de ordenar os elementos contribui para distorcer a percepção do leitor, criando uma espécie de ilusão; assim, nas páginas iniciais deste romance, quem parece protagonista é mero coadjuvante.

FONTE: Wikipedia e http://www.livrosabertos.com.br/os-luminares-eleanor-catton/

 

[Ana Lovejoy]

achei isso aqui que ela fez muito legal:

Eleanor Catton, the youngest ever winner of the Man Booker prize, has announced that she will put the money from her latest awards win towards establishing a grant that will give writers "time to read".



Catton's The Luminaries, set during New Zealand's 19th-century gold rush, took the Booker last year, when Catton was just 28. It has now won the Kiwi author the New Zealand Post best fiction and people's choice awards, and Catton has said that she will use her winnings of NZ$15,000 (£7,500) to help other writers.



Speaking at the awards ceremony, the author said that she is now in the "extraordinary position of being able to make a living from my writing alone, something I never dreamed was possible", and so it "seems only right to do as Emery Staines" – a character from The Luminaries – "would do, and start giving this fortune away".



Her grant, she said, is intended to give its recipient "the means and opportunity not to write, but to read, and to share what they learn through their reading with their colleagues in the arts".

"Writers are readers first; indeed our love of reading is what unites us above all else. If our reading culture in New Zealand is dynamic, diverse, and informed, our writing culture will be too," she told those attending the ceremony.



The grant has yet to be given a name, "in case a nice philanthropist hears about this and would like to lend their name and support to the project", but Catton said that the word which keeps coming to her as a possibility "is the horoeka, or lancewood, a native tree that begins its life defensively, with sharp rigid leaves and a narrow bearing, and at a certain point transforms into a shape that is confident, open and entirely new – so different, in fact, that the young and old versions of the tree look absolutely unalike. That is what I believe that reading can do."



Catton told the Guardian she intended that writers winning the grant would be awarded $3,000 each for "time to read". "My idea is that if a writer is awarded a grant, they will be given the money with no strings attached except that after three months they will be expected to write a short piece of non-fiction about their reading (what was interesting to them, what they learned) that will be posted online so that others can benefit from their reading too," she said.



"We're very lucky in New Zealand to have a lot of public funding available for writers, but they generally require the writer to have a good idea about what they want to write, and how, before they apply. I think that this often doesn't understand or serve the creative process, which is organic and dialectic; I also think it tends to reward people who are good at writing applications rather than, necessarily, people who are curious about and ambitious for the form in which they are writing. I'm also uncomfortable with the focus that it places on writing as production, with publication as the end goal, rather than on writing as enlightenment, with the reading as the first step."

Her move follows the author Chris Cleave's call earlier this summer for established writers to support the next generation of novelists. Cleave believes that "today's forces in book retail are lethal to new talent", and so "more than ever before it is up to the serious literary prizes and to established authors to seek out, champion and amplify the best new voices".



Speaking as he unveiled Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing as winner of the Desmond Elliott award in July, chair of judges Cleave said that today's major writers "have an unshirkable responsibility to raise up the next generation of novelists, to be an antidote to the shortsighted venality that seeks to crush publishers and their flair for taking risks", because if this generation of writers does not "give life to the next", they will be "damned as the ones who let literature be murdered on our watch".

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/02/eleanor-catton-grant-time-to-read-the-luminaries