Eleanor Catton becomes youngest Man Booker Prize winner for novel The Luminaries Subscribe to the Press Association: http://bit.ly/RvMVLq Eleanor Catton became the youngest ever winner of the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries on Tuesday. The 28-year-old New Zealander was presented with the award - widely seen as the UK's most prestigious literary prize - by the Duchess of Cornwall at a ceremony at London's Guildhall. At 832 pages, the book is also the longest to win, with the author beating five other shortlisted writers to the £50,000 prize. The novel, described as "dazzling" by chairman of judges Robert Macfarlane, tells the story of Walter Moody, who is drawn into a mystery when he attempts to make his fortune in New Zealand's goldfields in the mid-1800s. Described as a "Kiwi Twin Peaks", it is Canada-born Catton's second novel, with her first - The Rehearsal - being longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2010. Macfarlane said: "The Luminaries is a magnificent novel. Awesome in its structural complexity, addictive in its storytelling and magical in its conjuring of a world of greed and gold. "The maturity of this work exists in every sentence, indeed every sentence, and you are astonished by its knowledge and its poise." Macfarlane said he and the four other judges spent just under two hours in "pretty tough discussion" before agreeing on the winner, with no vote being needed. "The story is quite exceptionally compelling, he said. "It is vast, it is experimental. "We have rturned to it three times. We have dug into it, to use its own metaphor, and the yield it has offered at each new reading has been extraordinary. "It is astonishing. It is the longest novel ever to win the Man Booker prize by the youngest author ever to win, though these facts did not at all play in our decision." Catton was just 25 when she started writing the novel and 27 when she completed it. Ben Okri, 32, was the previous youngest winner in 1991 while Kiran Desai, 35, was the youngest woman to take the prize in 2006. Catton beat bookies favourite, British author Jim Crace, who had said his offering Harvest would be his final novel. He was ranked at 5/4 by William Hill while there had been a late surge of support for Catton, making her the 11/4 second. The other shortlisted novels were Irish writer Colm Toibin's 101-page The Testament Of Mary; We Need New Names the debut novel of Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo; The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, a Pulitzer prize winner who lives in the United States but also holds UK citizenshi;, and A Tale For The Time Being by Canadian-American writer Ruth Ozeki. The shortlisted authors, who were selected from 152 entries, go away with a £2,500 prize. Wearing a black velvet dress and jacket, the Duchess of Cornwall was presenting the award for the first time. Camilla, who is patron of the National Literacy Trust and Book Trust and a keen advocate of reading in children, described the event as the "highlight of the literary calendar". In a speech ahead of the prize giving, she said: "The whole point of this prize is not just to reward the masters of well-honed prose, but to celebrate the astonishing and intoxicating breadth, depth and beauty of the written word. "I get as much pleasure reading to my grandchildren as I do getting lost in my own favourite writers. The power of great literature is immense, a key to other kingdoms, an escape from the dull and mundane. "And many will discover this great and lifelong pleasure thanks to the Man Booker Prize." But yesterday novelist Julian Barnes warned the award will become less likely to showcase up and coming talent and predicted British writers will fare less well in future as the prize is opened up to US writers from next year. Barnes - a former winner himself for The Sense Of An Ending in 2011 - said he considered the changes to be a "bad idea" and appeared to be the result of trying to cash in on a new international market. In an interview for BBC Radio 3's Essential Classics, he said: "I was surprised because I had never heard anyone in the publishing world talk in favour of such a move. "I don't know quite where it came from - maybe from the top. Maybe it's just an example of capitalist expansionism. Once you've got one market sown up, you want to go after another. "I think it's generally a bad idea. I think that prizes thrive on having some restriction to them." News, Sport and Entertainment videos: http://www.youtube.com/pressassociation Follow PA on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/pressassoc The Press Association: http://www.pressassociation.com

• published: 16 Oct 2013
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