Eleanor Catton

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!' ”

There was a computer in our garage when I was growing up, and I'd go out there in winter and wrap myself in a blanket and write a story. ”

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand. ”

The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me. ”

From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea. ”

My parents took me to the Bronte parsonage in England when I was a teenager. I had a fight with my mum, burst into tears, jumped over a stile and ran out into the moors. It felt very authentic: A moor really is an excellent place to have a temper tantrum. ”

You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing. ”

The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other. ”

I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things. ”

There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach. ”