• Born in London, Ontario of an American father and New Zealander mother, Catton's family moved to New Zealand when Eleanor was 6.
• Critical of the NZ government of PM Sir John Key, who reinstated peerages.
• Lives in Cambridge, England, with her husband, poet Steven Toussaint.


• Author of three novels: The Rehearsal (2008) 328 pp.;
  The Luminaries (2013) 853 pp. (Booker Prize); Birnam Wood (2023) 426 pp
• Catton was the youngest ever Booker Prize winner at age 28.
• Wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film Emma, starring Anya Taylor-Joy.


• Catton writes in Microsoft Word, and in sequence, editing with her husband as she goes. She does not "draft".
• Reads a lot of psychology before a writing project, to get into other situations and out of her own situation.
• "I have very strong feelings about 1st and 3rd person. 1st person can be a trap; you are so close to the protagonist that other skills don't get pulled into play in the same way. 3rd person gives an author a better ability to control what to withhold or reveal." - Eleanor Catton

• "Seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material."
  
  - from Emma Ch. 49
     by Jane Austin

• First idea came from a writers residency in Amsterdam, NL, in 2015.
• She lived above an English language bookstore featuring protest literature and activist manifestos. Tony emerged from the reading of 15 protest books.
• Catton's two years of research before writing a word included family psychology. Lemoine emerged from researching psychopaths.


• Form came first. She knew the final effect she wanted the reader to feel.
• It took her around 30 attempts to write Page One.
• Wrote from beginning to end, polishing as she went, never backtracking.
• She believes that "through drafting often you can lose a sense of what the reader's experience is."
• Catton's husband "has read every version of every chapter multiple times."
• They argued a lot about the secne when Tony sees the guard pull a gun.


• Catton sees Austin as Shakespeare's heir to Dramatic Irony.
• Wanted this book to be a mash up of Emma and Macbeth.


• Who represents Macbeth?
• "I considered everybody for both manslaughter and murder, and for both victim and perpetrator." Each one of them could have been Macbeth.

"I wanted to see if I could emulate what [Jane Austin] had achieved in Emma formally. But rather than beginning in a satirical way and then bending it towards a comic form. . . I wanted to see if I could do that, but bend it towards a tragic form. . . I had this idea of fusing Macbeth and Emma."

• Marketing: Psychological Fiction, Literary Fiction, Suspense Thrillers
  Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction, Political Thrillers
• Genre: Realistic Modern-Day Long-Form Archplot
• Print Pages: 432; Word count: 138,221
  Reading Grade: 9th; Avg. wds/sent.: 16.36
  Lexical Density: 49.24; Flesch Reading Ease: 69.03


• POV: Mira, Shelley, Tony, Lemoine, Owen & Jill Darvish, Rosie; Person: 3rd; Tense: Past


• Publish date: March 7, 2023
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Audio book length: (12 hours 47 mins); Narr. Saskia Maarleveld


• A Best Book of 2023: New York Times Book Review, NPR, New Yorker, Washington Post,
  The Atlantic, Time, Financial Times, Slate, The Chicago Public Library, Kirkus,
  The Telegraph, A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick