Held each year as part of New Zealand Book Month, the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture 2012 was delivered by Marilyn Duckworth.

Held each year as part of New Zealand Book Month, the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture 2012 was delivered by Marilyn Duckworth.

Marilyn’s “state of the nation” lecture for literature and writing in New Zealand was aptly entitled Learning to Swivel. It addressed the changing face of New Zealand literature, ‘reflecting on the very different path and mode of travel for an aspiring novelist today’.

“Once books spoke for themselves. Writers found their own way, without being taught, and without needing to be part of their own marketing machine,” Marilyn comments, drawn from “a personal hindsight, gazing across more than fifty years.”

Held each year as part of New Zealand Book Month, the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture is delivered by the New Zealand Society of Author’s current President of Honour.

Marilyn describes herself as a novelist and sometime poet. She was born in Auckland and spent her childhood in England but has lived mainly in Wellington. Her first novel, A Gap in the Spectrum, was published when she was twenty-three; her fifth, Disorderly Conduct (1984), won a New Zealand Book Award. Her fifteenth novel Playing Friends was released in 2007. She has held the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, a Fulbright Fellowship in the USA and also writing fellowships at Victoria and Auckland universities. In 1996 Leather Wings was short listed for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2000 she startled herself by publishing her autobiography, Camping On The Faultline.

The lecture launches a month-long series of celebrations for New Zealand authors, illustrators and books.

Janet Frame Memorial Lecture 2012 Learning to Swivel by Marilyn Duckworth.

Marae, Te Papa, Wellington on Thursday 1st March 2012.

Related story: NZ Book Month 2012