Eleanor Catton s debut, The Rehearsal which Kate Atkinson called compulsively good...it continually calls into question the relationship between so-called reality and fiction, and the very nature of truth itself won the 2009 Betty Trask Award, was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and an MA in fiction writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand.