Eleanor Catton (Audience’s Choice Award winner)
Eleanor won the Adam Prize for her first novel The Rehearsal in 2007. Published by VUP in New Zealand, it has been since sold to publishers in the UK, the USA, and Europe. In 2007 Catton also won the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition, and was awarded the 2008 Schaeffer Fellowship to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.
Eleanor was born in Canada while her father, a New Zealand graduate, was completing a doctorate at the University of Ontario. She lived in Yorkshire until the age of 13, before her family settled in Canterbury, New Zealand. She attended Burnside High School, studied English at Canterbury University, and completed a Masters in Creative Writing at The Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington. She wrote the novel as her Master's Thesis.