Author Interview: Janis Freegard
We chat with Janis Freegard about her new short story collection Wild, Wild Women.
Janis Freegard is a multi-award-winning poet, novelist and short story writer and her latest collection of short stories is called Wild, Wild Women.
The stories in the collection cover a wide range of genres, themes and subjects; they are at times wise and touching, whilst other stories are startling, surreal, and sometimes troubling.
Amongst the stories we meet a woman swimming laps of a private luxury pool for a rich stranger, a woman whose tea leaf reading points the way into a new future, and a teenager on the run seeking safety in an Auckland night club.
The choices these women make are often wild and daring and they are not always the most sensible of choices.
Janis Freegard is regarded as one of the most unique and distinctive voices in the New Zealand literary world at the moment. She was the winner of the 2001 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award.
In 2014, she held the inaugural Ema Saiko Poetry Fellowship at New Pacific Studio in the Wairarapa, which is where she commenced her most recent prose poem sequence, Reading the Signs. Janis also won the 2019 Geometry/Open Book National Poetry competition. And in 2023 Wild, Wild Women was the Winner of the ATB | ITK award for short stories.
Her work has been in numerous poetry collections and four solo poetry collections - Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider, The Glass Rooster and, most recent, Reading the Signs. Her debut novel is called The Year of Falling.
We were thrilled when Janis took time out from her very busy schedule to discuss Wild, Wild Women and we wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to her.
This interview was done in conjunction with Caffeine and Aspirin, the arts and entertainment review show on Radioactive FM.
You can hear the interview and borrow Wild, Wild Women along with Janis' other titles, by following the links below.