New Zealand writer becomes youngest winner with The Luminaries

New Zealand author Eleanor Catton has, at the age of 28, become the youngest ever winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries, BBC News reported.

Her 832-page tale of the 19th-century goldfields is also the longest work to win in the prize's 45-year history.

"It's a dazzling work. It's a luminous work. It is vast without being sprawling," said Robert Macfarlane, chair of the judges.

Catton was announced as the winner on Tuesday night at London's Guildhall.

Picking up her prize, Catton admitted that The Luminaries had been "a publisher's nightmare".

The book, a Victorian mystery tale set during the New Zealand gold rush, is intricately structured according to astrological charts - with each section exactly half the length of its predecessor.

When it was shortlisted last month, the judges described it as a "Kiwi Twin Peaks".

"You begin it and you think you are in the clutches of a big baggy monster," said Macfarlane on Tuesday, adding that what followed was an "accelerating, quickening tilt to the narrative".

"We have returned to it three times now and we have dug into it - to use its own metaphors - and the yield it has offered at each new reading has been extraordinary," he said.

The prize, announced live on the BBC News Channel, was presented this year by the Duchess of Cornwall.

The other authors on the shortlist were NoViolet Bulawayo, for We Need New Names; Jim Crace, for Harvest; Jhumpa Lahiri, for The Lowland; Ruth Ozeki, for A Tale for the Time Being; and Colm Toibin, for The Testament of Mary.

Crace had been the bookies' favourite to win, with Catton reported to have a late surge of support over the weekend.

Macfarlane said the judges' final decision had been made after "just under two hours of pretty tough discussion".

Canadian-born Catton was raised in New Zealand and is the second writer from that country to win the prize. The first was Keri Hulme in 1985 with The Bone People - her first and only novel.

The Luminaries is the longest ever Booker winner, beating Hilary Mantel's 672-page Wolf Hall which won in 2009.

Macfarlane joked: "Those of us who didn't read it on e-readers enjoyed a full upper-body work-out."