Booker novelist Eleanor Catton responds to 'vicious' attacks in New Zealand

The Booker Prize-winning novelist Eleanor Catton has attacked the “inflammatory, vicious, and patronising” tone of debate in her native New Zealand, after being accused of treachery for criticising the right-of-centre government.

Catton, whose novel The Luminaries won the award in 2013, has become embroiled in a bitter war of words with sections of her home country’s media and political class, amid claims she is running New Zealand down overseas.

The battle escalated yesterday as Catton posted a scathing piece on her website vowing to continue to “discuss the frightening swiftness with which the powerful right move to discredit and silence those who question them, and the culture of fear and hysteria that prevails” in New Zealand.

The row first erupted at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India last week. Speaking on a panel, the 29-year-old author revealed her discomfort at being seen as an ambassador for New Zealand “when my country is not doing as much as it could, especially for the intellectual world”.

She accused her compatriots of succumbing to “tall poppy syndrome”, adding: “If you get success overseas then very often the local population can be very hard on you.”

The author reserved her bitterest words for the governing centre-right National Party led by the Prime Minister John Key. She said it was dominated by “neoliberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture”.

Mr Key responded, saying he was not surprised by the author’s words as she was aligned with the Green Party “and that probably summarises the Green Party view of this government”.

Catton was the youngest winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries in 2013, aged 28. Robert Macfarlane, that year’s chair of the judges, called it “a dazzling work, a luminous work. It is vast without being sprawling”. She has subsequently toured the globe with the book to great acclaim.

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Yet following her comments in Jaipur, the New Zealand media turned on the author. The backlash against her was spearheaded by Radio Live presenter Sean Plunket who called her a “traitor” and an “ungrateful hua”.

The DJ was subsequently forced to clarify that hua was a Maori word with “lots of meanings… ‘head up arse’ is one that would be applicable” and that he had not called Catton a “whore” .

He criticised Catton for “bagging” her home country despite having a taxpayer-funded job as a creative writing lecturer at the Manukau Institute of Technology.

Responding on her blog yesterday, Catton wrote: “I’ve been speaking freely to foreign journalists ever since I was first published overseas, and have criticised the Key government, neoliberal values, and our culture of anti-intellectualism many times”.

Most democracies would not find a writer expressing an opinion shocking, Ms Catton said, but what would be “truly” shocking would be one who “swore fealty to her government rather than to deep-felt values and ideals; who regarded arts funding as hush money and a part-time teaching position as an intellectual gag.”