Living in the Maniototo
  • Published: 1 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9781742749167
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Living in the Maniototo

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Sep 2012
Paperback
3 Mar 2008
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Through the eyes of a woman of myriad personalities - ventriloquist, gossip and writer - Janet Frame playfully explores the process of writing fiction.

Through the eyes of a woman of myriad personalities - ventriloquist, gossip and writer - Janet Frame playfully explores the process of writing fiction: the avoidances, interruptions and irrelevancies, as well as a teasing blurring between fact and fiction.

The landscape of the Maniototo becomes 'the bloody plain' of the imagination, as the narrator tells us about her marriages and children, her friends (real and imagined), her travels (between New Zealand and the United States) and her stay in the house left in her care by friends travelling in Italy. She must face the reality of death as well as probe the authenticity of the modern world.
  • Published: 1 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9781742749167
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
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About the author

Janet Frame

Janet Paterson Frame (1924-2004) is New Zealand's most internationally acclaimed and distinguished author. She received numerous awards, prizes, grants, fellowships and scholarships in New Zealand and abroad, including honorary doctorates from the universities of Otago and Waikato. In 1983 she was awarded a CBE for services to literature, and in 1990 was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the country's highest civil honour.

In her lifetime Janet Frame published eleven novels, four collections of short stories, a book of poetry, a children's book and three volumes of autobiography. Another novel, a book of poetry, a compilation of selected stories and a non-fiction collection have since been published posthumously and future publications containing new and previously uncollected material are planned.


Janet Frame was born in Dunedin in 1924. She was the author of eleven novels, five collections of stories, a volume of poetry and a children's book. She was a Burns Scholar and a Sargeson Fellow and won the New Zealand Scholarship in Letters and the Hubert Church Award for Prose. She was made a CBE in 1983 for services to literature, awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Otago University in 1978, and one from Waikato University in 1992. She received New Zealand's highest civil honour in 1990 when she was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand. Janet Frame died in January 2004.

portrait photo of Janet Frame

Also by Janet Frame

Towards Another Summer
Janet Frame in Her Own Words
The Daylight And The Dust
Faces In The Water
An Angel At My Table
See all

Praise for Living in the Maniototo

Quirky, rich, eccentric

Margaret Atwood

Probably as near a masterpiece as we are likely to see this year... it is a novel full of riches.

The Daily Telegraph (UK)

Puts everything else that has come my way this year in the shade.

The Guardian

The most original and resourceful novel I have read for a long time.

New Statesman

Frame’s novel is remarkable - full of word plays, cameo portraits and deliberate mystery

Publisher’s Weekly

Frame's writing has the unique quality of being both eccentric and central to the precarious business of our psycho-social existence. She offers us expressions of uncommonly articulated but familiar experience. Known for her ability to focus on alienation, madness and death, she is nevertheless capable of affirming the most exquisite sensations of being alive

The Australian

In many ways she (Frame) is incomparable

The Australian

Frame's fiction made [me] feel that I have always been a couple of steps from where I wanted to get in my own writing

Nobel Laureate Patrick White
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