Eleanor Catton becomes youngest Booker prize winner

London: New Zealand author Eleanor Catton has won the Man Booker prize of 2013, becoming the youngest winner of the prestigious award for her novel "The Luminaries", the Booker Prize Foundation said Tuesday. The 832-page book, set in 1866 during the New Zealand gold rush, is also the longest in the history of the prize. Catton is just the second New Zealander to win the prize, the first being Keri Hulme with "The Bone People" in 1985.
There were an "extraordinary" 151 novelists submitted for the prize and "hers is the one head that remains standing, waving in the warm breeze of the judges' favour," the foundation said. The chair of judges Robert Macfarlane described the book as a "dazzling work, luminous, vast". It is, he said, "a book you sometimes feel lost in, fearing it to be 'a big baggy monster', but it turns out to be as tightly structured as an orrery".