Janet Frame

Janet Frame was a highly celebrated New Zealand author and a recipient of numerous awards, including the Order of New Zealand, the nation’s highest civil award. Her early life was marked by trauma––growing up with poverty, family illness, and the death of two of her siblings, Frame found imagination and literature a form of escape. She graduated from Waitaki Girls’ High School in 1942, and studied part-time at Otago University while she was a student at Dunedin Teachers’ Training College from 1943-1944. Her teaching career was cut short by mental illness, and after being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, she was a patient in mental hospitals from 1947-1954. Frame published her first book of short stories, Lagoon and Other Stories (1951), while in the hospital, and she continued to write after being discharged in 1954. After her release, she befriended fellow writer Frank Sargeson and lived on his property for two years while writing her first novel, Owls Do Cry. In the following years, she traveled abroad, publishing several more works that explored isolation, eccentricity, and conformity. She also continued to explore genre, publishing a book of poetry in 1967, a children’s book in 1969, and a series of autobiographies that began in 1982. Frame passed away in 2004, but new works by her have been published posthumously as recently as 2013.