Eleanor Catton’s debut novel, The Rehearsal, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and the Dylan Thomas Prize, longlisted for The Orange Prize and received a Betty Task award. Her second novel, The Luminaries, has been shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker prize. 

Here, Granta Books editor Anne Meadows talks to Catton about opium sand gold, the ideas of the modern and the archaic, whether a good author can also be a sadist, and what it means to be a New Zealand writer today. ‘I am very firm in the belief that literature is not a competitive sport, we’re all doing the same thing, and hopefully for similar reasons.’