Janet Frame Author 1924–2004
Award-winning author
Nene Janet Paterson Clutha, better known as Janet Frame, could truly have claimed that writing saved her life. One of five children from a working-class Scottish New Zealand family, two of her sisters drowned in separate incidents and her brother, George, had frequent epileptic seizures.
Those traumatic occurrences set the tone for much of Frame's early adult life; training to be a teacher, she experienced anxiety and depression which led to suicide attempts and, in 1945, admittance to Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. The better part of the next decade was spent writing but being repeatedly re-admitted to psychiatric institutions, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and, in 1951, scheduled for a lobotomy.
The operation was cancelled when medical staff learned that Frame had, just days before, won the Hubert Church Memorial Award, then New Zealand's most prestigious literary award, for her first short story collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories. That marked a turning point for Frame who, later in the 1950s, lived and worked at the Takapuna home of writer Frank Sargeson, where she produced her first full-length novel, Owls Do Cry.
