Catton was announced as the winner on Tuesday night at London's Guildhal.
Her novel The Luminaries is the the tale of 19th-century goldfields. It comprises of 832 pages and is the longest work to win in the prize's 45-year history.
The chair of judges Robert Macfarlane described the book as a "dazzling work, luminous, vast". It is, he said, "a book you sometimes feel lost in, fearing it to be 'a big baggy monster', but it turns out to be as tightly structured as an orrery".
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