Janet Frame
| Janet Frame | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
28 August 1924 Dunedin, New Zealand |
| Died | 29 January 2004 (aged 79) Dunedin, New Zealand |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet |
| Genre | modernism, magic realism, postmodernism |
| Notable works | An Angel at My Table |
Nene Janet Paterson Clutha ONZ CBE (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author who published under the name Janet Frame. She wrote novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, and an autobiography. Frame's celebrity derived from her dramatic personal history as well as her literary career. Following years of psychiatric hospitalisation, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled when, just days before the procedure, her début publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize.
Janet Frame was born in Dunedin in the south-east of New Zealand's South Island as the third of five children of Scottish New Zealander parents. She grew up in a working-class family. Her father, George Frame, worked for the New Zealand railways, and her mother Lottie (née Godfrey), served as a housemaid to the family of writer Katherine Mansfield. New Zealand's first female medical graduate, Dr Emily Hancock Siedeberg, delivered Frame at St. Helen's Hospital in 1924.
Frame spent her early childhood years in various small towns in New Zealand's South Island provinces of Otago and Southland, including Outram and Wyndham, before the family eventually settled in the coastal town of Oamaru (recognisable as the "Waimaru" of her début novel and subsequent fiction). As recounted in the first volume of her autobiographies, Frame's childhood was marred by the deaths of two of her adolescent sisters, Myrtle and Isabel, who drowned in separate incidents, and the epileptic seizures suffered by her brother George (referred to as "Geordie" and "Bruddie").
...
Wikipedia