The Rehearsal
NZSA BEST FIRST BOOK OF FICTION 2009
The Rehearsal - Eleanor Catton
Victoria University Press, ISBN 978-0-86473-581-2, $30.00 pbk
A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance, and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve.
Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Canterbury. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for The Rehearsal.
She also won the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short story competition and the audience award at 'Once Upon a Deadline', a one-day story contest in the 2008 NZ International Arts Festival Writers and Readers Week and was awarded the 2008 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.
Eleanor is currently in the States studying creative writing at the University of Iowa. She was the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship which enabled her to attend the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
She has secured a top UK literary agent and has just signed major contracts with two prestigious international publishers. Little, Brown (USA) and Granta Books (UK) are both very excited about Eleanor’s book and have leapt at the chance to publish her in their respective markets.
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