Reminder - Marilyn Duckworth OBE to deliver the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture

From New Zealand Society of Authors

Held each year as part of New Zealand Book Month, the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture is delivered by the New Zealand Society of Author’s current President of Honour. It has been our delight to have Marilyn Duckworth OBE, (photo right by Marti Friedlander), in this role for the 2011-2012 period and we are pleased to announce that she will be delivering this important lecture at Te Papa, Wellington on Thursday 1st March 2012.

This lecture is intended to provide an overview of the “state of the nation” for literature and writing in New Zealand, such that the reading public may have a greater understanding of what it means to be a writer in New Zealand. Marilyn’s lecture is aptly entitled Learning to Swivel and will address the changing face of New Zealand literature, ‘reflecting on the very different path and mode of travel for an aspiring novelist today’. “Once books spoke for themselves. Writers found their own way, without being taught, and without needing to be part of their own marketing machine” Marilyn comments, drawn from “a personal hindsight, gazing across more than fifty years.”

Marilyn describes herself as a novelist and sometime poet. She was born in Auckland and spent her childhood in England but has lived mainly in Wellington. Her first novel, A Gap in the Spectrum, was published when she was twenty-three; her fifth, Disorderly Conduct (1984), won a New Zealand Book Award. Her fifteenth novel Playing Friends was released in 2007. She has held the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, a Fulbright Fellowship in the USA and also writing fellowships at Victoria and Auckland universities. In 1996 Leather Wings was short listed for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2000 she startled herself by publishing her autobiography, Camping On The Faultline.

Marilyn will be introduced by Labour Member of Parliament for Wellington Central Grant Robertson.

The lecture launches a month-long series of celebrations for New Zealand authors, illustrators and books. It will take place on Thursday 1st March 2012, at 6pm on the Marae, Te Papa, Wellington. Admission is free.

This event is open to the public and will appeal to teachers, librarians and book-lovers everywhere.

6pm Thursday 1st March 2012, Marae, Te Papa, Wellington