![Janet Frame](https://www.odt.co.nz/sites/default/files/styles/odt_square_small/public/story/2024/08/frame_janet_2.jpg?itok=qT8Ucox-)
Dunedin-born Frame’s 1930s childhood home at 56 Eden St will be open to the public for free on August 24.
A free writers event will also be staged at her alma mata, Waitaki Girls’ High School, that night.
There will be a screening of the biopic An Angel at My Table on August 22.
Frame died in 2004, in Dunedin, at the age of 79, when the awareness of her life and achievement was at a peak.
Her seminal 1980s three-volume autobiography To the Is-land, An Angel At My Table and The Envoy from Mirror City was turned into the award-winning feature film An Angel At My Table in 1990.
The film underscored her international reputation while highlighting her New Zealand roots.
Janet Frame Eden Street Trust chairwoman Chloe Searle said opening up the house for free was hopefully "a wee nudge" for Oamaru locals to actually visit.
She believed Frame would have quietly enjoyed the fact her legacy was still being talked about.
"I think not surprised, but probably quite happy to be remembered in her hometown."
Frame and her family settled in Oamaru after moving every few years throughout Otago and Southland on regular transfers with their railwayman father.
She had a modest upbringing at Eden St from the age of 6 until she left Oamaru to attend teachers college in Dunedin in the early 1940s.
Ms Searle said the trust knew the impact of Frame’s writing and life was significant so it was appropriate to have a focus around her birthday, on August 28, in opening up her former home.
On the evening of August 24, author Kate Camp will chair a panel of New Zealand authors Pip Adam, Penelope Todd, Emma Neale and Rachel Fenton at the Waitaki Girls’ High School auditorium from 7pm.
They will share readings of Frame’s work and discuss her writing.
The house was an important focus, particularly for the local volunteers under the trust, Ms Searle said.
It was bought about 20 years ago and "reframed" to bring it back to a semblance of the Frame era of occupancy in the 1930s and 1940s — something Frame and other family members were involved with at the time.
While much of the interior was replicas, it did contain a couple of the writing desks Frame used, and other family artefacts were on display.