Portrait of Janet Frame

Birthday profile

Janet Frame

Janet Frame, New Zealand author and poet (died 2004)

Born
August 28, 1924
Died
January 29, 2004
Zodiac sign
Virgo
Birth year
1924

About Janet Frame

Janet Paterson Frame (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author. She is internationally renowned for her work, which includes novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, and an autobiography, and received numerous awards including being appointed to the Order of New Zealand, New Zealand's highest civil honour. Frame's celebrity derived from her dramatic personal history as well as her literary career. Following years of psychiatric hospitalisation, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled when, just days before the procedure, her debut publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize. Many of her novels and short stories explore her childhood and psychiatric hospitalisation from a fictional perspective, and her award-winning three-volume autobiography was adapted into the film An Angel at My Table (1990), directed by Jane Campion. New Zealand's first female medical graduate, Dr Emily Hancock Siedeberg, delivered Frame at St. During this period, Frame was first diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, which was treated with electroconvulsive therapy and insulin. In 1951, while Frame was still a patient at Seacliff, New Zealand's Caxton Press published her first book, a critically acclaimed collection of short stories titled The Lagoon and Other Stories. The volume was awarded the Hubert Church Memorial Award, at that time one of New Zealand's most prestigious literary prizes.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when Janet Frame was born

Janet Frame was born in 1924. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1924

  • #1 song"It Had to Be You" – Isham Jones
  • Top movieThe Thief of Bagdad (Douglas Fairbanks)
  • Best-selling bookSo Big – Edna Ferber

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentFirst Winter Olympics held in Chamonix, France
  • Top headlineCalvin Coolidge elected president in a landslide
  • Technology milestoneIBM founded
  • Defining fadMah-jongg craze sweeps America
  • Notable inventionSpiral-bound notebook
  • World population1.95 billion

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderCalvin Coolidge
  • Sports championWashington Senators (World Series)
  • U.S. population114.1M

1924 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Janet Frame's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19242026
Gas$0.21$3.45/gal
Average home$5,800$435,000
Average income$3,520$67,500
Movie ticket$0.25$11.95
Postage stamp$0.02$0.73
Population114.1M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.