Janet Frame

Born Janet Paterson Frame in Dunedin, New Zealand, on 28 August 1924, she was the third of five children of George Frame, a railway worker, and Lottie Godfrey, who had once been a housemaid to the family of Katherine Mansfield. She grew up in Oamaru and attended Waitaki Girls' High School, and her adolescence was marked by the drowning of two of her sisters, Myrtle and Isabel, in separate accidents, and by her brother's epilepsy. In 1943 she began training as a teacher in Dunedin, but in 1945, during a probationary year at Arthur Street School, she walked out of her classroom while an inspector was visiting, and that year she was committed to Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she spent much of the next eight years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, where she was treated with electroconvulsive therapy and insulin. She was scheduled for a lobotomy when her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, won the Hubert Church award, and the operation was called off days before it was due. After her final discharge the writer Frank Sargeson gave her a place to live and work, and there she wrote her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957). Soon after, she left for Europe and spent seven years mostly in London, where psychiatrists at the Maudsley concluded that she had never had schizophrenia at all. Novels came quickly, among them Faces in the Water (1961), drawn from her years in the asylums, and The Edge of the Alphabet (1962). She returned to New Zealand in 1963 and kept writing, from A State of Siege (1966) to Living in the Maniototo (1979) and The Carpathians, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989. Her three volumes of autobiography, To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy from Mirror City, reached a wide new audience through Jane Campion's 1990 film. Appointed to the Order of New Zealand in 1990, she died of acute myeloid leukaemia in Dunedin on 29 January 2004, at seventy-nine.

In April 1955, not long after her final discharge from Seacliff, Frame moved into a former army hut on Frank Sargeson's property in Takapuna. She stayed fifteen months. Sargeson, she later recalled, was often depressed that writers were neglected and his own books out of print, while in the hut she wrote her first novel, Owls Do Cry.