Janice Marriott is a writer, editor, audio producer, screenwriter, creative writing tutor and mentor, manuscript assessor, poet and gardener. Several of her books have been shortlisted for or won awards and she has also been the recipient of a number of writing residencies, as well as the prestigious Margaret Mahy Medal in 2018. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Biography
Janice Marriott was born on 3 October1946 in England. She lists some of her favourite childhood books as The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Black Beauty, Lassie, and Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Famous Five series. She attended school in Napier and Gisborne, studied at Victoria University of Wellington and took a course in rare books librarianship in San Francisco. She worked in radio and television in California and Vancouver. Later she graduated from the Wellington College of Education. In 1983, she left teaching and began work producing audio books for Learning Media. Since the publication of her first children's book in 1989, she has written fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, radio plays, documentaries and scripts for episodes of the TV series The WotWots. Her work includes many educational texts for various publishers as well as stories and articles in magazines and anthologies. More recently, she shifted from Wellington to Auckland to be closer to her family and to spend more time with her grandson. She is a tutor for the New Zealand Institute of Business Studies in the Writing Stories for Children and Poetry courses and a member of the New Zealand Association of Manuscript Assessors. She tutors beginning writers through her online courses Go Write Now and writes poetry on her poetry blog.
Awards and prizes
In 1994, Janice was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Auckland College of Education. She was University of Otago College of EducationWriter in Residence 1997 and was awarded the Foxton Fellowship in 2001. Janice was the 2018 recipient of the Margaret Mahy Medal, giving her lecture in Auckland on 8 April 2018. She won the 1996 Aim Supreme Award and Senior Fiction Award and the Esther Glen award with Crossroads. In 2007 her book Thor’s tale won the Junior Fiction Category of the New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards. She was also a finalist in the Non-Fiction section with Soldier in the Yellow Socks. Several of her books have been named as Storylines Notable Books. Janice is also a keen gardener and was shortlisted for Columnist of the Year 2011 for her gardening column in House and Garden magazine.
