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Janet Frame
#WritcoStoryChallenge
The footsteps following me sounded closer. I ran through the empty corridors of the hospital, my heart pounding with terror.
I turned a corner and stopped short. I had reached a dead end.
Janet Frame, who has died aged 79, was New Zealand's best known but least public author. The originality and power of her fiction ensured that she was frequently spoken of as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature, most recently last year, when a journalistic leak from Stockholm revealed that she was once again on the shortlist.
The author of 12 novels, four story collections, one book of poetry and three volumes of autobiography, Frame was born in Dunedin, on the South Island. Her early life, spent in small towns in Otago and Southland, where her father worked for the railways, was blighted by a sense of alienation and the deaths by drowning of two of her sisters. While she was working as a trainee teacher in Dunedin in 1945, the combined effects of her feelings of inadequacy and the family bereavements brought on an emotional breakdown, which doctors mistook for schizophrenia - a misdiagnosis that kept her in mental hospitals for the better part of a decade.
In reference to this period, Frame would later write: "I inhabited a territory of loneliness which ... resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return, living, to the world bring, inevitably, a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession ... [It is] equal in its rapture and chilling exposure [to] the neighbourhood of the ancient gods and goddesses."
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The footsteps following me sounded closer. I ran through the empty corridors of the hospital, my heart pounding with terror.
I turned a corner and stopped short. I had reached a dead end.
Janet Frame, who has died aged 79, was New Zealand's best known but least public author. The originality and power of her fiction ensured that she was frequently spoken of as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature, most recently last year, when a journalistic leak from Stockholm revealed that she was once again on the shortlist.
The author of 12 novels, four story collections, one book of poetry and three volumes of autobiography, Frame was born in Dunedin, on the South Island. Her early life, spent in small towns in Otago and Southland, where her father worked for the railways, was blighted by a sense of alienation and the deaths by drowning of two of her sisters. While she was working as a trainee teacher in Dunedin in 1945, the combined effects of her feelings of inadequacy and the family bereavements brought on an emotional breakdown, which doctors mistook for schizophrenia - a misdiagnosis that kept her in mental hospitals for the better part of a decade.
In reference to this period, Frame would later write: "I inhabited a territory of loneliness which ... resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return, living, to the world bring, inevitably, a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession ... [It is] equal in its rapture and chilling exposure [to] the neighbourhood of the ancient gods and goddesses."
© All Rights Reserved
