Hocken Digital Collections

Janet Frame Centenary

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Description2024 marks the centenary of the birth of Janet Frame, one of New Zealand’s most esteemed literary figures. Her life and work is documented in several collections at the Hocken Collections, most notably her personal and literary papers, but also in the papers of her friends and colleagues. Sources include John Money's papers and Reg Graham’s photograph collection. Browse Hocken Digital Collections to see examples from these collections.

Other collections including material relating to and by Janet Frame are the papers of Charles Brasch, Ruth Dallas, Michael King, Mildred Surry, Sheila Natusch, and Frank Sargeson, all of which are described on the Hākena database.

History / BiographyJanet Paterson Frame – Lottie and 'Curly' Frame’s third child – was born in St Helen’s Hospital, Dunedin on 28 August 1924. The Frames soon moved to Southland, before the family of seven settled for good in Oamaru in 1931.

Frame grew up in a household in which ‘writing was an accepted pastime.’ She began writing as a child and ‘lived in a climate, a kind of climate of writing [and] saw [her] mother writing her poems on backs of envelopes and so on.’ Reading was integral to this ‘family preoccupation’, in which writing was considered ‘a natural way of expressing feelings, observations, etc.’

The fundamental value of writing and reading for Frame personally was cemented by her education, access to libraries, and a circle of like-minded adult friends and supporters. The private power of language stayed with Frame as she faced challenges including family upheavals and bereavements, financial precarity, social discomfort, debilitating at times, a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, and minimal state support for the arts.

Caxton Press published Frame’s first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, in 1951. In the following decade, her literary reputation expanded beyond regional and national borders. Her work was published in the USA and the UK – and was translated too. Over her career, Frame published eleven novels, four collections of short stories, a book of poetry, a children’s book, and three volumes of autobiography. The latter was adapted into an award-winning film, released in 1990. The Janet Frame Literary Trust has published several works by Frame since her death in January 2004.

Frame earned the status of New Zealand’s most internationally acclaimed and distinguished author of the 20th century. She received many awards, prizes, grants, fellowships, and scholarships in New Zealand and overseas for her writing. Honorary doctorates were conferred on her by Waikato and Otago universities, with her links to this university dating back to the 1940s, when she was a student, and 1965, when she was a Robert Burns Fellow. In 1989, Frame received a Commonwealth Writers Prize for her final novel, The Carpathians. An Arts Foundation Icon Award and a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement, were awarded to her in 2003.

Frame’s personal and literary papers, held at Hocken Collections, were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand register on 28 August 2024, the centenary of her birth. This large collection is a rich resource for scholars of Frame’s life and writing, and the post-WWII New Zealand literary scene. Included are book manuscripts and literary drafts, letters from her many correspondents, travel documents, grants and residency documents, publishing contracts and financial records, correspondence with friends and family, diaries and notebooks, copies of reviews and newspaper clippings, photographs and papers relating to literary festivals, talks and conferences, and papers relating to the film An Angel at My Table.
External links

Janet Frame (official website)

Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand

Photograph