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
Stevan
Eldred-Grigg http://www.eldred-grigg.com/
Pamela Gordon, Chair, Janet Frame Literary
Trust
