Today is Janet Frame CBE (1924-2004)'s 100th birthday

Posted: Wednesday Aug 28, 2024

Hocken Collections are excited to announce that her papers, held at Hocken, have been inscribed into the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Register.

Janet Frame had a long association with the University of Otago – she studied at Otago, and later held the Burns Fellowship in 1965. She intended that her papers would be acquired by the Hocken and was in periodic correspondence with Hocken staff on this topic from the 1960s. For that we feel truly privileged.

Frame is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated authors. Her vividly imaginative and perceptive novels and short stories were unlike any other New Zealand fiction when published from the 1950s. Frame preserved drafts and manuscripts, correspondence and other literary and personal papers for future researchers.

The papers document Frame’s extraordinary life from childhood, as a young woman experiencing mental distress in an unsympathetic health system, as a highly respected and popular author and to her later life and death.

If you're interested in learning more about Frame and her papers, an exhibition 'Janet Frame's Bookshelf: A Writer's Reading Life' opens to the public tomorrow at 9am at Special Collections, University of Otago Library, in the deBeer gallery on the first floor of the central library.

Janet Frame: Literary and Personal Papers - UNESCO Memory Of The World (unescomow.nz)