Janet Frame's estate gifts $20,000 in birthday awards
Wellingtonian Geoff Cochrane has been granted the Janet Frame Poetry Award for 2009
and
Alison Wong of Titahi Bay has received the Janet Frame Fiction Award for 2009.
85k by Janet Frame's 85th birthday
The 2009 awards are worth $10,000 each, making a grand total of $85,000 that has been given to benefit New Zealand writers by Janet Frame's estate from an endowment fund the world renowned Kiwi icon set up for that purpose before her death in 2004. The annual award is timed to commemorate the late author's birthday, 28 August. This year Janet Frame would have turned 85.
In making the 2009 announcement, I'd like to make the point that both this year's award recipients are highly regarded for their poetry as well as for their fiction, something they have got in common with Janet Frame who wrote bestselling collections of poetry as well as the prizewinning prose - short stories and novels as well as memoir - that made her famous.
The Janet Frame trustees feel sure that Geoff Cochrane's most recent poetry volume, the small but perfectly formed Pocket Edition (VUP 2009) and Wong's astonishingly lyrical and historically important debut novel As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin 2009), will attract further honours and prizes.
Geoff Cochrane photograph by Bruce Foster
Geoff Cochrane's profile on the NZ Book Council home page:http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/cochrane.html
Geoff Cochrane's profile on the VUP home page:http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup/authorinfo/gcochrane.aspx
Latest book is Pocket Edition (VUP 2009) http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup/2009titleinformation/pocketedition.aspx
Alison Wong photgraph by Alan Knowles.
Alison Wong's profile on the NZ Book Council home age:
Alison Wong photgraph by Alan Knowles.
Alison Wong's profile on the NZ Book Council home age:
Latest book is As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin 2009)
Janet Frame's latest title in New Zealand is the short story collection Prizes,
which seems appropriate :-)
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