Geoff Cochrane Wins Janet Frame Poetry Award

media release
28 August 2009
immediate

Geoff Cochrane Wins Janet Frame Poetry Award for 2009

Wellingtonian Geoff Cochrane has been granted this year’s Janet Frame Poetry Award. The announcement of the annual award is timed to commemorate the late author's birthday, 28 August. This year Janet Frame would have turned 85.

Geoff said, “This is of course a great honour, and it’s wonderful to have my name mentioned in the same sentence as Janet Frame’s”

Geoff is best known as a poet with many highly regarded collections to his name, most recently “Pocket Edition”. He has also written two novels, including “Tin Nimbus”, named a 1996 Commonwealth Best First Book Prize regional finalist.

Alison Wong of Titahi Bay has received this year’s Janet Frame Fiction Award

The awards are worth $10,000 each, and according to Pamela Gordon, Frame's niece and executor, a total of $85,000 has been awarded to talented NZ writers from an endowment that Janet Frame set up before her death in 2004.

In making the 2009 announcement, Pamela Gordon made the point that both this year's award recipients were highly regarded for their poetry as well as for their fiction, something they had in common with Janet Frame who had written bestselling collections of poetry as well as the prizewinning prose that had made her famous.

Gordon said the Janet Frame trustees felt sure that Cochrane's most recent poetry volume “Pocket Edition” (VUP 2009) and Wong's debut novel “As the Earth Turns Silver” (Penguin 2009), would attract further honours and prizes.

ENDS

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