2019 Janet Frame Prize for Christchurch Novelist

PRESS RELEASE Wednesday 28 August 2019

Novelist and historian Stevan Eldred-Grigg receives 2019 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award

Janet Frame’s estate has announced their biennial award to coincide with the celebrated author’s 95th birthday on the 28th of August. The award is currently worth $5,000. Janet Frame founded the Janet Frame Literary Trust in 1999 and bequeathed her ongoing royalty income to an endowment fund from which she directed that occasional financial gifts should be given to established NZ writers of fiction and poetry. Since Janet Frame’s death in 2004 her charitable trust has awarded over $120,000 in grants and donations.

 Janet Frame herself had benefited from well-timed literary prizes over her long career, most famously the PEN prize in 1952 that saved her from an imminent lobotomy because her doctor at Seacliff Mental Hospital read the newspaper report about it. The diagnosis of schizophrenia hanging over Frame at that time was later discredited. Frame understood that it was not just the award money that was welcomed but also the boost in morale for an author who may have been feeling under-appreciated.

2019 recipient Stevan Eldred-Grigg  has echoed this doubly welcome effect of an unexpected prize:

“What wonderful news! I was always aware of the way Janet would deflect, in her characteristic dry way, all the pooh-bah-ish pomposities of book awards by saying she was grateful for getting this or that grant because it would mean she could leave the lights switched on a little longer.”

“It does feel very much as though Janet has somehow reached out in encouragement.“

“Janet has been one of the brightest lights in my firmament of words, ever since I first read A State of Siege at the age of sixteen. I keep coming back to Janet's work. I learn new things each time I do come back. So it's very moving to think that now she's reaching me in another way, too, by way of this award.”

Stevan Eldred-Grigg was born in a speeding taxi in 1952, somewhere between Blackball and Greymouth Hospital. Just as his birthplace may be difficult to pinpoint, so does Eldred-Grigg sometimes blur the lines in his work between fiction, autobiography and social history. His prize winning first novel Oracles and Miracles (1987) earned him high praise for the realistic portrayal of the lives of working class women in Christchurch. His painstakingly researched work Diggers, Hatters and Whores: The story of the New Zealand Gold Rushes (2008) was cited by Man Booker winner Eleanor Catton as essential background reading for her novel The Luminaries. Dr Eldred-Grigg has published 20 books and is currently working on “a sort of memoir of the West Coast”. He has been described as “a natural story-teller” (METRO magazine).

 Stevan Eldred-Grigg, like Janet Frame, exemplifies the theme of “the expatriate returns”. He has lived in many places in New Zealand and around the world including China, Germany, Mexico, USA, Waiuku and Wellington, but has recently decided to make the move back to Christchurch where he grew up.

Portrait of Stevan Eldred-Grigg  © Gareth Watkins 

http://www.janetframe.org.nz/Awards.htm

https://www.penguin.co.nz/authors/stevan-eldred-grigg

Stevan Eldred-Grigg  http://www.eldred-grigg.com/

 Pamela Gordon, Chair, Janet Frame Literary Trust 

An Anthology of VMC Introductions

Writers as Readers, the specially issued VMC40 anthology of introductions to Virago Modern Classics, is a wonderful read in itself, with the essays written by:

Margaret Drabble | Beryl Bainbridge | Angela Carter | Maggie O'Farrell | Elizabeth Jane Howard | A.S. Byatt | Penelope Lively | Sarah Waters | Jonathan Coe | Diana Souhami | Jilly Cooper | Elizabeth Bowen | Mark Bostridge | Alexander McCall Smith | Sarah Dunant | Rachel Cooke | Zadie Smith | Anita Desai | Sophie Dahl | Clare Boylan | Paula McLain | Diana Athill | Marina Lewycka | Claire Messud | Michèle Roberts | Simon Russell Beale | Amanda Craig | Hilary Mantel | Elizabeth Taylor | Ali Smith | Linda Grant | Jane Gardam | Julie Burchill | Carmen Callil | Helen Oyeyemi | Marian Keyes | Nora Ephron | Sandi Toksvig | Kate Saunders

 Read the Introduction from Writers as Readers.

Writers as Readers is a celebration of forty years of the Virago Modern Classics list.

"Started in 1978, Virago Modern Classics is dedicated to the rediscovery and championing of women writers, challenging the often narrow definition of 'classic'.

In this collection, forty of the most significant writers of the past century tell us about one of their favourite writers by introducing books from the Virago Modern Classics collection, offering a glimpse at the treasures that have been published over the past four decades: they may be great works of literature; they may be wonderful period pieces; they may reveal particular aspects of women's lives; they may be classics of comedy, storytelling, diary-writing or autobiography."

Writers as Readers includes the introduction Michèle Roberts wrote for Janet Frame 's The Daylight and the Dust, a collection of the best of her short stories.

Virago Modern Classics 40th Anniversary

This year Janet Frame publisher Virago Press has been observing the 40th anniversary of its Virago Modern Classics imprint: 1978-2018. To celebrate, they have published "a baker's dozen of stunningly designed deluxe paperbacks by some of our most-loved authors". The list includes Janet Frame's novel Faces in the Water, introduced by Hilary Mantel.

Perks of the job: this delicious haul of VMC40 promo material (cotton book bag, postcards, bookmarks, catalogue) arrived in my post box along with the VMC40 special edition of Faces in the Water by Janet Frame and Writers as Readers, an anthology of forty VMC introductory essays.

The other authors in the VMC 40 edition include Nora Ephron, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Rosamond Lehman, Angela Carter, and Janet Frame's friend Grace Paley.

Our Wāhine: Janet Frame

Janet Frame

Artist: Kate Hursthouse

Our Wāhine is an illustrated history of New Zealand’s extraordinary women created by New Zealand artist Kate Hursthouse (www.katehursthouse.com).

"To celebrate the 125th anniversary of Women’s suffrage in New Zealand, Kate will be illustrating extraordinary women from New Zealand’s history. The text is being researched and written by Kate’s mother Karen Brook. This passion project is done after hours with no funding and aims to create a visually exciting and accessible overview of the role of New Zealand women throughout history."

I love this image of Janet Frame because it avoids the stereotype that the occasional artist can fall into, of making their illustration resemble the actor Kerry Fox who played 'Janet' in the Jane Campion movie more than it looks like the real life Janet - who did live a happy fulfilling life and did grow old and wasn't by any means perpetually tormented.

An examplar of respectful quotation

Goodbye, Cruel by Melinda Smith (Pitt Street Poetry, Australia 2017)

I'm happy to recommend this book by Canberra poet Melinda Smith, who is a previous winner of the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for poetry. To learn more about the poet and the book, have a look at the excellent launch speech by John Foulcher.

"Smith’s newest collection is in part a paean to life even as it elegises several deaths. However, her primary concern is the binary opposition of scribing and erasure. She uses erasure to great effect in poems such as “Darkling with temazepan” (44), her version of “Ode to a Nightingale” and, through her inking and inscription, Smith forges a connection with the dead whom she memorialises and the living who read her work. That connection may be tenuous, a thread as short and slender as a line of poetry, but it is a link nevertheless, and one of great importance. This book is the work of a vivid, vitalic voice in Australian poetry." (from the Pitt Street Poetry website).

In Goodbye, Cruel Melinda Smith has cleverly and movingly drawn from excerpts of poems by Janet Frame for two of her poems. Before she published this book she  asked permission of the copyright owners (the Janet Frame Literary Trust).  I'm glad she did because it has been good to get to know Smith's work. 

It's always gratifying when an author does the right thing and asks permission (if a work is still in copyright) and also clearly indicates the source of the text they quote, enhance, chop up, play with or otherwise utilise for their purpose of following their own poetic vision.  

Conversely, it is disappointing to come across, as I do now and then, examples of Janet Frame texts used for 'erasure' or other exploitative poetic formats without the Janet Frame copyright being properly acknowledged.

I wish that more of the creative writing schools in New Zealand would teach the basics of professional ethics and copyright law, surely it isn't so difficult! 

A tasty smorgasbord of poetry

Poems from the Pantry: 135 years of food in poetry from New Zealand, 1863-1998 is an anthology of New Zealand poems that are either about food or that use food as imagery.

It is styled after the iconic Kiwi recipe book the Edmonds Cookery Book. It's even arranged in sections such as: 'Puddings and jellies', 'Bread, buns and rolls', Cakes and biscuits', 'Eggs' and so on.

Edited by Judith Haswell and Janny Jonkers. Ordering and other details on the website.

The included authors comprise a Who's Who of New Zealand poetry. Because the editors imposed a time limit ending in 1998, Janet Frame's posthumously published poetry wasn't considered for inclusion, but there is a piece of hers there from The Pocket Mirror (1967).

Happy snacking!

Playing the thought-game

A Matter of Fact: Talking Truth in a Post-Truth World

Jess Berentson-Shaw

BWB texts (2018)

Here is another of those Bridget Williams Books "short books on big subjects from great New Zealand writers" that I have talked about before, because so many of them either quote Janet Frame and/or otherwise name-check her.

This book is about as topical as it can be, about being able to distinguish between good information and misinformation, and being able to communicate constructively about the gaps between.

 The author of this recently published book has employed a relevant quote from Janet Frame in a chapter discussing how to encourage and develop critical thinking.

Janet Frame wrote so profoundly and so profusely on a vast range of topics and it's good to be reminded that her writings are appreciated as a rich historical and sociological resource as well as a literary one.

"Unless we have the courage to use our inherited human riches to name, name, name things visible, things invisible, in our land, to play the thought-game from time to time, to raise a few more rich fat dreams and poems and get a fair price for them, we’ll be spiritually hungry and poor; we may not even survive."

~ Janet Frame

(from 'This Desirable Property', a talk broadcast on New Zealand YC radio stations and published in the NZ Listener, 3 July 1964, reprinted in JANET FRAME IN HER OWN WORDS)