Eleanor Catton took the 2013 Man Booker Prize for “The Luminaries” at an awards ceremony in London on Tuesday night. At age 28, Catton is the youngest novelist ever to win the prestigious prize — and her novel, at more than 800 pages, is the longest winning book.

    YOUTH and heft triumphed at Britain’s Booker Prize on Tuesday, as 28-year-old New Zealander Eleanor Catton won the fiction award for “The Luminaries,” an ambitious 832-page murder mystery set in the Victorian-age New Zealand.

    The choice should give heart to young authors of oversized tales. Catton is the youngest writer and only the second New Zealander to win the prestigious award — and her epic novel is easily the longest Booker champion.

    One of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Man Booker not only carries a 50,000-pound (US$79,800) cash award but also can help turn a literary work into a best seller.

    The winner, who was 25 when she started the work before finishing it two years later, received the award, and a 50,000-pound check, from the Duchess of Cornwall at the Guildhall.

    Catton said it was “a good thing” that the judges looked beyond her age: “I feel honored and proud to be living in a world where someone’s biography doesn’t get in the way of how their work is viewed.”

    Catton said after accepting the award that she didn’t think about the length of the book while she was writing it, “partly because I was inside it for the whole time.”

    “It wasn’t until I received the proof of the book that I thought, ‘Jeepers, this is actually quite heavy,’” she said. “I’ve had to buy a new handbag, because my old handbag wasn’t big enough to hold my book.”

    She thanked her British publisher, Granta, for protecting her from feeling the commercial pressures around a tome that could be seen as “a publisher’s nightmare.”

    The epic tale of love, murder, conspiracy and deceit set in the “lesser known gold rush” in New Zealand in the 1860s triumphed over established authors including Colm Toibin and Jim Crace.

    Catton took issue with the notion that her book could put off potential readers.

    “A good book is a book that deserves to be its length,” she said. “That could be true of a short book or it could be true of a long book — the length is the vessel that is containing the story and it’s the right vessel.”

    Seen in those terms, her second novel is a supertanker.

    “The Luminaries” centers on a man named Walter Moody who comes to a New Zealand prospecting town in 1866 and finds himself immersed in a web of saloons, seances and skullduggery.

    It has a sprawling plot and cast of characters that take in a blackmailing schooner captain, murder, a whore with a heart of gold, her lover and “astral twin,” opium and gold smuggling, a secretive group of businessmen trying to get to the bottom of what is going on in the boomtown of Hokitika, exploited Chinese workers and, for good measure, a sadistic prison warden.

    The book’s elaborate narrative is structured according to astrological charts: It consists of 12 sections, each half the length of the last, from a 360-page opener to a final chapter of a single page.

    “I’d always wanted to write a story that was set during the gold rush years just because it was a period of New Zealand history that had always really fascinated me,” Catton said.

    “It had been a big part of my childhood, I’d always holidayed on the west coast and there you can’t help but come upon all these old, rusting dredges and boarded-up mines and all sorts of things. All the relics of the gold rush are still there, quietly disintegrating or decomposing — so that had been in my mind for a really long time.”

    Travel writer Robert Macfarlane, chair of the judges, said: “It is a dazzling work, a luminous work. It is vast without being sprawling.” It can, he said, be approached as a murder mystery with seances, corpses, lawsuits and puzzles. “The pleasures it yields in those simple ways are immense as well.”

    “It is beautifully intricate without being fussy,” Macfarlane said. “It is experimental ... but does not by any means neglect the traditional virtues of storytelling. Its story is quite exceptionally compelling.”

    At 832 pages it overtakes “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel, the previous longest with 672. Macfarlane joked that the judges without e-readers “enjoyed a full upper body work out.”

    It was up against Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary,” which at 104 pages would have been the shortest novel ever to win the prize.

    Catton revealed “embarrassingly” she has had to buy a new handbag as the book would not fit in her old one.

    “The Luminaries” is likely to experience the traditional “Booker bounce” with sales soaring after the announcement.

    “Once you begin it, there is a static opening,” Macfarlane said. “It begins in fixity and then it accelerates out of it. Once you’re on the down slope the pace is irresistible.”

    Riffing on the subject matter, Macfarlane said the judges had “dug into” the work three times “and the yield it has offered at each new reading is extraordinary. It is a novel about value, which requires a huge investment from its readers… but from which the dividends are astronomical.”

    Macfarlane said the novel “takes place in a culture which is utterly capitalized” and focused on money, but also dwells on tenderness and love.

    He said the panel of five judges met for two hours — brief by Booker standards — to choose the winner, which was decided without a vote. “No blood was spilled in the judging,” he said.

    Macfarlane described it as “awesome” that someone in their 20s had won the prize. “One tries one’s best to read it independently of that knowledge. The maturity of the work, you read every sentence and you are astonished by its knowledge and its poise.”

    The judges described the book as “simply luminous; a novel of arch craft and tender heart.”

    This is Catton’s second work. Her debut novel “The Rehearsal” won the Betty Trask Prize, an Amazon first novel award in Canada and was long listed for the Orange Prize in 2010.

    “I hope that every book I write will be completely different from the last,” Catton told Australia’s Booktopia earlier this year. “I have also made a private pledge that I will never write a novel about somebody trying to write a novel. There are more than enough of those.”

    Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. She held an adjunct professorship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an M.A. in fiction writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters.

    This is the last year that the Booker — founded in 1969 and officially named the Man Booker Prize after its sponsor, financial services firm Man Group PLC — will be open only to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies.Beginning next year, Americans and other English-language writers will be able to enter as well.

    The rule change aims to expand the global scope of the Booker even further, although some fear it may alter the delicate chemistry of the prize.

    (SD-Agencies)