Janet Frame's estate gifts $20,000 in birthday awards

Wellingtonian Geoff Cochrane has been granted the Janet Frame Poetry Award for 2009 and Alison Wong of Titahi Bay has received the Janet Frame Fiction Award for 2009.

The awards are worth $10,000 each, making a grand total of $85,000 that has been given to benefit New Zealand writers by Janet Frame's estate from an endowment fund the world renowned Kiwi icon set up for that purpose before her death in 2004.

The annual award is timed to commemorate the late author's birthday, 28 August. This year Janet Frame would have turned 85.

In making the 2009 announcement, Frame's niece and executor Pamela Gordon made the point that both this year's award recipients were highly regarded for their poetry as well as for their fiction, something they had in common with Janet Frame who had written bestselling collections of poetry as well as the prizewinning prose that had made her famous.

Gordon said the Janet Frame trustees felt sure that Cochrane's most recent poetry volume Pocket Edition (VUP 2009) and Wong's debut novel As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin 2009), would attract further honours and prizes.

Janet Frame Estate on the Web: http://www.janetframe.org.nz/
Geoff Cochrane photograph above by Bruce Foster Geoff Cochrane's profile on the NZ Book Council home page:http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/cochrane.htmlGeoff Cochrane's profile on the VUP home page:http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup/authorinfo/gcochrane.aspxLatest book is Pocket Edition (VUP 2009) http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup/2009titleinformation/pocketedition.aspx

Alison Wong photgraph above by Alan Knowles.
Alison Wong's profile on the NZ Book Council home page:http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/wongalison.htmlLatest book is As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin 2009) http://www.penguin.co.nz/afa.asp?idWebPage=30233&ID=1957900&SID=852656065