22 Facts About Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton was born on 1985 and is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter.

Eleanor Catton completed a master's degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Eleanor Catton's 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.

Eleanor Catton was born in Canada in 1985, where her father was a graduate student completing his doctorate at the University of Western Ontario on a Commonwealth scholarship.

Eleanor Catton's mother Judith is a New Zealander from Canterbury, while her father, philosopher Philip Catton, comes from Washington State.

Eleanor Catton's family returned to New Zealand when she was six years old, and Catton grew up in Christchurch.

Eleanor Catton's mother was a children's librarian at the time, and the family had no TV; Catton was an avid reader and writer from an early age.

When she was aged 13 the family spent a year living in Leeds while her father was on a sabbatical at the university, and Eleanor Catton attended local comprehensive Lawnswood School which she referred to as "amazing" and "gloriously rough".

That year Eleanor Catton was awarded a fellowship to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she completed her MFA and taught creative writing until 2011.

Eleanor Catton was previously, at the age of 27, the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In November 2013 Eleanor Catton was awarded the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for fiction for The Luminaries.

In January 2014 it was announced that Eleanor Catton would be awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature in May at Victoria University of Wellington, where she has studied.

Eleanor Catton made zombie movies with her friends as a teenager and participated in the 48Hours film challenge, but never studied screenwriting.

When Luminaries was adapted into a television miniseries Eleanor Catton was screenwriter, an "unusual if not entirely unheard-of" arrangement.

Eleanor Catton wrote hundreds of drafts of the pilot episode, but in late 2015 BBC Two declined the series; she then shifted the focus to make the protagonist Anna Wetherell, a minor character in the book, and rewrote the series, which was commissioned by the BBC in mid-2016.

Eleanor Catton served as showrunner with director Claire McCarthy during filming.

Eleanor Catton wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film version of Emma, adapted from Jane Austen's novel.

Eleanor Catton admitted she had never actually read the novel when approached to write the screenplay, but was familiar with more recent adaptations, including the film Clueless.

The title is taken from Macbeth, and Eleanor Catton has said the novel draws inspiration from the play.

Eleanor Catton met Chicago-born poet Steven Toussaint at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Toussaint moved to New Zealand in 2011 to begin a PhD in US avant-garde poetry at Victoria University of Wellington.

The couple later lived in Mount Eden while Eleanor Catton taught creative writing part-time at the Manukau Institute of Technology.

Eleanor Catton describes Toussaint as the first reader of her drafts, and he prevailed in an argument over whether one character in The Luminaries should be killed off.