An Angel at My Table

Janet Frame

Random House Australia, 2008 - Women authors, New Zealand - 460 pages

With a heartfelt introduction from Jane Campion. Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections. Gathered here in a single edition are the three parts of Janet Frame's autobiography. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a materially poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student and years of incarceration in mental hospitals (essentially for wanting to pursue a career as a poet), followed eventually by her entry into the saving world of writers and the 'Mirror City' that sustains them. This is not just the records of a life but also the flourishing of a writer's career. Janet Frame accomplishes 'the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors'. All three volumes of this autobiography - To The Is-Land (1983), An Angel At My Table (1984) and The Envoy From The Mirror City (1985) have won major literary prizes. Internationally lauded director Jane Campion made a film of An Angel At My Table that won international jury prizes at Venice, Toronto and other film festivals. Janet Frame died in January 2004.

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User Review  - starbox - LibraryThing

"The years following childhood become welded to their future" By sally tarbox on 8 June 2018 Format: Kindle Edition Second volume of Janet Frame's autobiography, opening where the previous one ended ...

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User Review  - Marse - LibraryThing

I first heard of New Zealand author Janet Frame several years ago when I read that she had been living in a mental hospital and about to be lobotomized, when a doctor recognized her name as the ...

About the author

Janet Frame is a writer. She was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1924. Frame has written eleven novels, five collections of short stories, a volume of poetry, and a children's book. She has received the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Turnavsky Prize, a Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, a Robert Burns Fellowship, and a Sargeson Fellowship. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature from Otago University and is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and she is a past President of Honour of the New Zealand Society of Authors. Her three autobiographies, To the Island, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City, were turned into a three-part television series, and then a 1990 motion picture directed by Jane Campion. Frame was awarded the CBE in 1983. In 2015 Janet Frame's 1957 debut novel, Owls Do Cry, topped the second annual Great Kiwi Classic poll run by the New Zealand Book Council and Auckland Writers Festival.

Bibliographic information

• Title: An Angel at My Table
• Author: Janet Frame
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Random House Australia, 2008
• ISBN: 1741666058, 9781741666052
• Length: 460 pages