New Zealand creative writing teacher, editor and writer
Adrienne Jansen |
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| Born | 1947
Wellington |
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| Occupation | Writer |
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| Nationality | New Zealand |
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Adrienne Jansen is a New Zealand creative writing teacher, editor and a writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She has worked closely with immigrants, and her writing often relates to the migrant experience.
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]
