Booker Winner Eleanor Catton Responds to Critics

The newest–and youngest–winner of the Man Booker Prize has not been immune to the controversy that inevitably accompanies winning a major literary award. In an interview with the Guardian, Eleanor Catton says that the criticisms following her win for The Luminaries has a lot to do with her gender and her age. "People whose negative reaction has been most vehement,” the author says, “have all been men over about 45." Catton went on to say that in the publishing world, “male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel...interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime."