Janet Frame (1924 - 2004)    

Born in Dunedin, New Zealand, she was one of five children of a railway worker. Dr. Emily Hancock Siedeberg, New Zealand's first female medical graduate, delivered her at St. Helens Hospital, Dunedin. Frame grew up in Oamaru (which she later fictionalised as "Waimaru").
Two of her three sisters drowned in separate incidents at a young age, and her only brother suffered from epilepsy. Only he and his sister, June, of the five children, went on to marry and have families.
In 1943 Frame enrolled at Dunedin Teachers' College, studying English, French and psychology at the adjacent University of Otago. In 1947, while doing student-teaching in Dunedin, Frame walked out of the classroom. She had no wish to return to teaching and instead wanted to devote her life to literature.
College authorities soon contacted her parents and pressured them to sign papers committing Frame to Seacliff Mental Hospital, where staff incorrectly diagnosed her as suffering from schizophrenia. Thus began eight years on and off in various psychiatric hospitals, undergoing over 200 shock treatments. In 1951, while a patient, she published her first book, a collection of short stories entitled "The Lagoon and Other Stories", which won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. That award led her doctors to cancel the leucotomy they had scheduled to perform on her.
From 1954 to 1955 the pioneering New Zealand author Frank Sargeson let Frame live at no charge in an outbuilding at his residence in the Auckland suburb of Takapuna. Sargeson encouraged her in good writing habits, but she never let him see her work. She wrote her first novel "Owls Do Cry" while staying at his place. In 1956, Frame left New Zealand with the help of a State Literary Fund grant. For seven years she lived in London.
She returned to New Zealand in 1963, upon learning of her father's death..
Jane Campion adapted Frame's autobiographical trilogy ("To the Island", "An Angel at my Table", and "The Envoy from Mirror City") into the 1990 film An Angel at my Table. This autobiography contains an important account of an extended stay in a mental hospital in the days just before such hospitals generally closed in the 1960s.
In 1983 Frame became a Commander of the Order of British Empire (CBE) for services to literature. She won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize for her book The Carpathians. In 1990 the Queen admitted her to the Order of New Zealand. Frame became an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and received honorary doctorates from two New Zealand Universities.
She died at Dunedin hospital, aged 79, from acute myeloid leukaemia, shortly after winning the New Zealand Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement.