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JanetFrame

  • Writer
Janet_Frame_Key_Profile.jpg

Janet Frame (1924 - 2004) is an icon of New Zealand literature and her international reputation rests on an original, "edge of the alphabet" use of language. She was twice rumoured to be short-listed for the Nobel Prize, and was acclaimed as "one of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle). Her life and work have notably been translated to screen. 

Screenography

2010 Subject Television
2004 Subject Television
2000 Subject Television
1990 Original Author Film
1978 Original Author Short film

Biography

Janet Frame is famed for creating unique fictional worlds, yet her biography is entwined in her works' critical and public reception. Her writing was influenced by her early life: a working class childhood during the Depression, several family tragedies, and a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia in her early 20s led to a special understanding for the poor and marginalised.

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination. ”

Janet Frame, in her book The Envoy from Mirror City (volume one)

Related images

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Michael King wrote Janet Frame's biography Wrestling With The Angel: A Life of Janet Frame.
Photographer: Reg Graham.
Janet_Frame_Gallery.jpg
Photographer: Reg Graham
Janet-Frame-Gallery-3.jpg
Portrait of Janet Frame.
Photographer: Reg Graham