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1924
Born in Dunedin
___________
1946
Publishes first story,
University Entrance in
The Listener
___________
1957
Publishes first novel,
Owls Do Cry
___________
1965
Burns Fellowship
___________
1970
Intensive Care
___________
1972
Daughter Buffalo
___________
1974
Katherine Mansfield
Fellowship
___________
1982-85
To the Is-land, An Angel
at my Table and The
Envoy from Mirror City
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1987
Frank Sargeson
Fellowship
___________
1989
The Carpathians
___________
1998
Nomination for the
Nobel Prize for
Literature
__________
2003
Awarded inaugural $60,000 Prime Ministers Award for Literary Achievement
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Janet Frame (1924-2004)
2003 Icon
Writer
Janet Frame was born in Dunedin. Poverty, as well as several
traumatic family events, made for a difficult childhood. These early
life experiences, as well as the period spent in mental institutions,
frequently feed into her writing, particularly her early work, though
Janet has warned her readers many times of the danger of treating her
fictional statements as autobiography.
Janet's first collection of short stories, The Lagoon, for which
she won the Hubert Church Memorial Award, was published in 1951. Many
of the stories collected in that first volume are told from the point
of view of children or outcasts, whose imaginative worlds are barred
from, or dismissed by, socially conformist adults.
Following her release from hospital in 1954, Janet accepted an invitation
from Frank Sargeson to live in an old army hut in the garden of his Takapuna
home. This provided a much-needed period of isolation from which she emerged to rejoin the society she had been removed
from for so long and embarked on her writing career in earnest.
From the publication of her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), Janet's
career developed rapidly. Living in London as well as the USA for extended
periods, she published five novels and a collection of short stories
during the 1960s, closely followed by another two novels in the early
1970s. In 1972 Janet changed her surname to Clutha, but continued to
publish under what by then was a well-established name in New Zealand
literature.
There was an uncharacteristic period of silence from Janet Frame for
seven years until Living in the Maniototo was published in 1979. This
was followed by her acclaimed three-volumed autobiography, made accessible
to a wide audience through Jane Campion's well-known movie adaptation
An Angel at my Table.
She received a Frank Sargeson Fellowship in 1987, was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 and was awarded the Inaugural $60,000 Prime Minister's Award for Literature in 2003.
Janet Frame passed away at the beginning of 2004 aged 79.
The Goosebath, a posthumous collection of 120 previously unpublished works, edited by Bill Manhire (2005 Laureate), was launched in 2006. |
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