Wordfest presents Eleanor Catton

Wordfest presents Eleanor Catton

Hosted by Shelley Youngblut

Wordfest is thrilled to present award-winning novelist Eleanor Catton and her climate-change psychological thriller, Birnam Wood. The conversation hosted by Shelley Youngblut, Wordfest’s CEO and Creative Ringleader, will start at 7:00 PM MT and will followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.  

We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible for Wordfest to connect you with Eleanor Catton.

About Birnam Wood

“Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it’s as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work—what a treat.” 
—Stephen King

From the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is a gripping psychological thriller grounded in a provocative and sly exploration of some of the most pressing issues of our troubled times.

Birnam Wood is on the move… A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster has created an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice.

For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira, Birnam Wood’s founder, stumbles on an answer: occupying the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. The enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira and Birnam Wood, he makes them an offer that would set them up for the long term. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?

Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

About Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton is the author of the international bestseller The Luminaries (2013), winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal (2009), won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Award, and the NZ Society of Authors’ Best First Book Award, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Writers Prize, and longlisted for the Orange Prize. As a screenwriter, she adapted The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen’s Emma for feature film. Born in 1985 in London, Ontario, and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Cambridge, England

About Host Shelley Youngblut

Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. A former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM, she is now a weekly panelist on CBC Radio's Daybreak Alberta. Follow her on Twitter @youngblut and Instagram @youngblutshelley.

Curiouser?

• Eleanor Catton discusses Birnam Wood, plotted novel and psychological immersion -The Bookseller
• Fiction to look out for in 2023 -The Guardian