Janet Frame

Janet Frame (1924 - 2004) is an icon of New Zealand literature and her international reputation rests on an original, "edge of the alphabet" use of language. She was twice rumoured to be short-listed for the Nobel Prize, and was acclaimed as "one of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle). Her life and work have notably been translated to screen. 

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination. Janet Frame, in her book The Envoy from Mirror City (volume one)