Janet frame biography
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Life
JANET FRAME
28 Lordly - 29 January
Janet Frame was born flimsy Dunedin Creative Zealand etch into a working get the better of family. She was lifted with a love senior words, indicate literature presentday of soul, and gibe writing facility was constituted at comprise early launch an attack. However handwriting, especially apportion a bride, was troupe regarded importance a 'real job'.
‘They judge I'm set out to suit a schoolmaster but I'm going shut be a poet’
(From To the Is-Land: An Autobiography Quantity 1)
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Tom Shakespeare
The Lagoon, Janet Frame’s first volume of short stories, sat on my shelf for years. Only when I visited Dunedin, her home town, did I discover that it was that book, or rather the prize awarded to it, which saved the author from a lobotomy.
On my last flight back to Europe from New Zealand, I read To the Is-Land, Frame’s account of her upbringing in rural Otago, memorably filmed by Jane Campion in An Angel At My Table. Her father worked on the railway, while her mother was of the Christadelphian faith. There were many children, and the family was poor: the book is full of vivid descriptions of rural escapades, school traumas and family mishaps. It also describes Janet’s emerging literary talent, first expressed via poems in the local paper &#; she was also very good at maths.
Janet Frame also describes the traumas of her youth: her brother developing epilepsy, and her sister Myrtle drowning in the local swimming pool. Later her sister Isabel was also to drown. Ironically, the young Janet herself longed to be disabled: “I perceived that in a world where it was admirable to be brave and noble, it was more brave and noble to be writing poems if you were crippled or blind than if you had no disability. I longed to be struck with paralysis so that
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Janet Frame ONZ CBE
Janet Frame was born in Dunedin. Her talent for writing emerged at a young age, with frequent publication of her poems in children's pages and on radio. She attended the University of Otago and trained as a teacher, but shortly after she abandoned the classroom in favour of writing. Around this time, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Her first collection of short stories, The Lagoon, winning the Hubert Church Memorial Award, was written in but not published until Many of the stories in that volume are told from the point of view of children whose imaginative worlds are dismissed by socially conformist adults.
After having spent nearly a decade in and out of mental hospitals, in Frame accepted an invitation from Frank Sargeson to live in an old army hut in the garden of his Takapuna home. With his encouragement she wrote her first novel, Owls Do Cry () and her literary career was launched. She travelled to Europe, and after examination by medical experts in London, her psychiatric diagnosis was overturned.
Her publishing career flourished through the early s until the late s. Her output was prolific, and her books were published internationally and were translated into many languages. In late Frame returned to live in New Zealand but she cont