TORONTO -- Canadian-Kiwi writer Eleanor Catton gushed with Canuck pride as she won a Governor General's Literary Award for "The Luminaries" on Wednesday -- just a month after the novel made her the youngest author to win the Man Booker Prize.

The 28-year-old -- who moved with her family from London, Ont., to New Zealand at age six -- said she was proud to receive the honour from the country of her birth and touched knowing it "will have a very real effect of strengthening" her relationship "with Canada in years to come."

"I feel very much that there is this kind of umbilical cord that I have with Canada, and it's been strengthened all the more because of having publishers here," Catton said after claiming the $25,000 honour for the gold-rush mystery story published by McClelland & Stewart.

"I think that definitely the personal effect of this award for me is, I feel very much like it's a vote of confidence in a way from Canada, kind of saying, 'You have a home here if you'd like one."'

Catton has actually tried to follow through on that welcoming feeling.

She said she and her partner, American-born poet Steven Toussaint, were "very close to moving back to Canada a couple of years ago" when he got accepted into McGill University for a PhD.

"We were very excited about moving to Montreal and bought a French dictionary and started brushing up on our French and everything, and then various things got in the way and he ended up applying also for New Zealand schools and got kind of a better package down there."

She said she'd still like to return to Canada one day, possibly to teach creative writing, which she's doing at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland.

"I think it's a really fun and enlivening and enriching compliment to the writing life, so I'd love to come back in that capacity, or just to live and be."

The Canada Council for the Arts administers the Governor General's Literary Awards, which honour writers in both official languages and in seven categories. Each winner receives $25,000.

This year's English-language non-fiction prize winner is "Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page" (McGill-Queen's University Press) by Vancouver-based Sandra Djwa, who was also a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction earlier this year.

Djwa, who first met Page in 1970, said it took over 10 years to get the book published because her former publisher turned it down, "as did several other multinationals with an eye on the larger North American market."

"It is disconcerting to think that were it not for the Block Grants provided by the Canada Council to Canadian-owned publishers, this book, like many of the stories you have heard of this morning, might not have been published," she said in her acceptance speech.

Katherena Vermette of Winnipeg claimed the poetry prize for "North End Love Songs" (The Muses' Company), while the drama honour went to "Fault Lines: Greenland -- Iceland -- Faroe" (Coach House Books) by Nicolas Billon, who was born in Ottawa, grew up in Montreal and now lives in Toronto.

The winner for children's literature, text was Toronto-based Teresa Toten for "The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B" (Doubleday Canada), in which the protagonist is dealing with obsessive compulsive disorder.

In the children's illustration category, the winner was Toronto's Matt James for "Northwest Passage" (Groundwood Books), which is told through the lyrics of Canadian singer/songwriter Stan Rogers' ballad.

The translation winner was Donald Winkler of Montreal for "The Major Verbs" (Signal Editions), a translation of a book by Quebec's Pierre Nepveu.

"The Luminaries" is Catton's second novel after 2008's "The Rehearsal," which won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

The structure and characters of the 832-page story, which is set in 1866 New Zealand, revolve around astrological charts from the year in which the tale is set.

A peer assessment committed appointed by the Canada Council to judge the fiction finalists called it "an entire narrative universe with its own mysterious cosmology."

"This exhilarating feat of literary design dazzles with masterful storytelling," the committee -- which included Toronto's Kyo Maclear, Beth Powning of Markhamville, N.B., and Edmonton's Thomas Wharton -- said in a statement.

"Each character is a planet -- complex and brilliantly revealed. Precise sensual prose illuminates greed, fear, jealousy, longing -- all that it means to be human."

Catton, who received 50,000 pounds (C$80,000) for her Booker win, said she's trying to keep her head up on her shoulders amid the buzz surrounding "The Luminaries."

"Really, the most important thing about writing is loving the work, and I'm hoping that that doesn't change -- that at the end of the day, the most fun that I can imagine is still not actually going to a shmoozy party but sitting down in front of my laptop on my own and kind of living inside a paragraph."

Just when she'll do that to begin writing a new novel, she's not sure.

"I haven't got anything on at the moment. I'm being pulled about 12 different ways at the moment, so I'm just going to enjoy that," she said. "I think that in the months before a proper fictional idea takes root, how I experience it is, it's almost like when you have a crush on somebody but you can't quite admit to yourself yet that you have a crush on them, and it's almost like your mind is always slightly turning away from that possibility. You're leaving it open in your mind but you can't really look at it head-on.

"And so I've got a couple of crushes at the moment but I can't talk to you about them."

The publisher of each winning book receives $3,000 to support promotional activities.

Non-winning finalists receive $1,000.

This year, 978 titles in the English-language categories and 624 titles in the French-language categories were submitted.

Gov. Gen. David Johnston will present the awards on Nov. 28th in Ottawa.