Biography
Adrienne Jansen was born in Wellington in 1947. [1] [2]
She worked as a writer at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa for 11 years. [1] She was also heavily involved in refugee resettlement and teaching ESOL (English for speakers of other languages). [1] [3] In the 1980s, she helped set up the Porirua Language Project (now part of English Language Partners). [4] [5] [6] This background and her years of experience of living and working among immigrants is reflected in her writing (both fiction and non-fiction), which often focuses on the migrant experience. [7] [6] She has frequently worked alongside migrants to help them tell their stories. [4] [8]
Her published work includes fiction and non-fiction for adults and children, collections of poetry, short stories broadcast on radio and poems and stories in anthologies such as 4th Floor [9] and Best New Zealand Poems. [10] Her stories have been highly commended in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition ("War", 2002) and shortlisted for the BNZ Literary Awards. [1] She worked with Guy Jansen in the last years of his life on his book Sing New Zealand: the story of choral music in Aotearoa. [11]
In 1990, Jansen was a Winston Churchill Fellow, travelling to Canada and the United Kingdom to look at access to education for disadvantaged groups in those countries. [1] [2] She founded the Creative Writing Programme at Whitireia Polytechnic in 1993. [1] This was the first full-year, full-time writing course in New Zealand, and it was designed by Jansen to be accessible to all and to encourage diversity and inclusiveness. [12] She was coordinator of the programme until 1999 and taught fiction and editing as well as writing several online courses until most of the programme was disestablished in 2019. [13] [14] She was co-founder of Whitireia Creative Writing Programme's Escalator Press in 2013 [5] and her novel The Score was the first book to be published by this new imprint. [4] In 2016, she helped set up Landing Press. [15] [5]
Jansen has appeared at numerous author talks [16] and writing festivals. [17] [8] She has also run creative writing workshops for Māori writers (with Huia Publishers), Pasifika writers (with Creative New Zealand) and in Vanuatu and Indonesia. [1]
Her manuscript "Light Keeping" was shortlisted for the 2021 Michael Gifkins Prize. [18]
She lives in Titahi Bay, Porirua. [16]
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