Photo Credit: Liz March
JANET FRAME LITERARY TRUST
Gift for Auckland Poet on Janet Frame’s Birthday (28 August)
2021 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry goes to Siobhan Harvey
The Janet Frame Literary Trust is delighted to announce the recipient
of the 2021 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry. Auckland
poet Siobhan Harvey will receive $5,000 from a fund set up by Janet
Frame for the purpose of encouraging New Zealand authors “of poetry
and imaginative prose”. The biennial award is timed to commemorate
Janet Frame’s birth date on the 28th of August. Janet Frame was
famously saved from an imminent lobotomy when a doctor noticed that
she had won a literary prize. She received many grants and prizes over
her long career and wanted to give back to her fellow writers.
Siobhan Harvey is originally from England and made New Zealand her
home 20 years ago. She is the author of eight books of poetry and non-fiction.
Her latest volume of poetry and creative non-fiction, ‘Ghosts’ (Otago
University Press 2021), explores themes of migration, homelessness and
family trauma. The UK Poetry Archive describes her poetry as “that of
a quester – a voyager — meditating on separation and discovery, on
time lost and time regained, on the tug of distant familial
connections, and the new global connectivity which means never being
out-of-touch.” Harvey is a lecturer in creative writing at the
Auckland University of Technology and her work is published widely in
New Zealand and international journals and anthologies.
Siobhan Harvey said that she was humbled “to be honoured in a legacy
left by New Zealand’s foremost author” as well as finding herself the
recipient of an award given previously to writers whose work she
admires, such as Peter Olds, Tusiata Avia, David Eggleton, Catherine
Chidgey and Alison Wong.
“In this fraught time of a global pandemic and in an era in which the
financial earnings of writers in New Zealand are below the minimumwage, this bequest allows me to fund writing time I would not have been able to afford otherwise.”
Siobhan Harvey is the author of eight books, including Ghosts (Otago University Press, 2021) and 2013 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award-winning Cloudboy (OUP, 2014). She received the 2020 NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship, and won the 2020 Robert Burns Poetry Award and the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems. Her work appears in recent anthologies: Arcadian Rustbelt: Poets Emerging 1980–-1995 (University of Liverpool Press, 2021), Feminist Divine: Voices of Power and Invisibility (Cyren US, 2019) and, translated into Italian, in Alessandra Bava (ed.), HerKind: Anthology of Contemporary New Zealand Poets (Editione Ensemble, 2021).
Siobhan Harvey reads from her new book Ghosts
The Friday Poem: ‘If befriending Ghosts’ from Ghosts
ANZL page
