“New Zealand writer Janet Frame, who was reportedly short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature last year and drew on her experiences in mental hospitals for her fiction, has died aged 79. Frame, who had leukemia, was regarded internationally as New Zealand’s finest writer since Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923. A recluse for much of her life, she was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic when young and spent eight years in mental hospitals, where she was reportedly given shock treatment 200 times. She was saved from a scheduled lobotomy in 1951 when a hospital superintendent learned that her first book, The Lagoon And Other Stories, had won New Zealand’s leading award for fiction.”