BURNS FELLOW FOR 1965

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30570, 13 October 1964, Page 18

BURNS FELLOW FOR 1965

(N.Z. Press Association) DUNEDIN, Oct. 12. New Zealand’s most coveted literary prize, the University of Otago’s Robert Burns Fellowship, has been awarded to Miss Janet Frame for 1965. This is the first time the fellowship has been awarded to a woman. The fellowship, which was founded by a £26,000 gift to the University of Otago from an anonymous group of donors, was established to encourage and promote imaginative New Zealand literature as well as assisting writers with the university. The Burns fellow lives in the city during the university year and is associated with the university English department. He is permitted to do limited lecturing and seminar work, but is mainly free to pursue his own literary work and studies. Miss Frame was born in Dunedin in 1924. Her first book of short stories, “The Lagoon,” published in 1952, won the Herbert Church Memorial award.

Since then she has written four novels which have been published in England and the United States, as well as in New Zealand. These are “Owls Do Cry” (1957), “Faces in the Water” (1961), “The Edge of the Alphabet” (1962), and “Scented Gardens for the Blind” (1963). Two volumes of her short stories, “The Reservoir”— stories and sketches, and “Snowman, Snowman”—fables and fantasies, have been published in the United States where the title story of the first volume appeared in the “New Yorker.” Early this year Miss Frame was chosen by the editors of the “Times Literary Supplement” to represent New Zealand in their issue called, “Open to the World,” where Commonwealth and American authors were asked to write on English literature and its place in their development.

Miss Frame’s contribution was entitled, “Memory and a Pocketful of Words.”