Eleanor Catton’s New Zealand

This is going to be a celebrity-free site, lacking in what editors call “big names” — unless renown has been won by proficiency with pen, camera and paint. Eleanor Catton, winner of the Booker Prize for The Luminaries, is now a much bigger name than she was at the start of this week. As anyone who saw her take the Booker stage will have noticed immediately, however, her favourite light is not lime. In The Guardian Review today, she writes fondly about her native New Zealand. It’s a piece in which she laments the inadequacy of language to describe the natural world, so it’s a shame that the editor failed to notice that Catton herself had earlier twice fallen back on the word “stunning”. Put it down to the rush for topicality.

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