Sunday, October 30, 2011

Janet Frame Speaks For Herself

Accept no imitations or inventions!

Listen to what Janet Frame had to say for herself!

Presenting Janet Frame's public writings and her speech made "on the record" from nearly 70 years of her life (from ten years old to shortly before her death at the age of 79)

Janet Frame In Her Own Words
Penguin NZ (November 2011)

Contents include:


  • All of her published short non-fiction
  • Nearly 80 pages of direct speech excerpts from 35 of her broadcast and press interviews
  • Letters to the Editor covering 50 years of her life (from 1935 to 1985)
  • Various speech notes
  • Reports on fellowships
  • A conference paper Frame gave at Hawaii
  • Her diary notes on a Toronto writers' festival (where she appeared along with Susan Sontag, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Homero Aridjis, John Wain, Margaret Atwood and others)
  • Speech given at a poetry reading in a prison
  • Speech given on receiving a Massey University Medal
  • Acceptance speech at the Chilean Embassy in Wellington
  • Transcript of a previously unknown oral history recording given while Frame was a NZ delegate at a PEN conference in Sydney
  • Eulogies for well-known writer friends - Baxter, Sargeson, Brasch
  • Reviews - Maurice Gee, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad etc
  • Memoir
  • Reminiscences and reports on fellowships
  • Excerpts from correspondence on literary and publishing topics
  • Satire, poems and short stories
  • Interviews published in Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, USA, UK
  • Comments on her writing process and her reputation
  • Favourite writers
  • etc... etc...
  • Even a cartoon


Publication date: 31 October 2011

Available in shops early November.

It is a beautiful compact jacketed hardback, but there is nothing small about the more than 80,000 words inside the covers, which pack quite a punch.

There will also be an e-book version.

Selected and edited by Frame's executors Denis Harold and Pamela Gordon

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