Adrienne Jansen

Her manuscript "Light Keeping" was shortlisted for the 2021 Michael Gifkins Prize.

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 and Best New Zealand Poems. Her stories have been highly commended in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition (“War”, 2002) and shortlisted for the BNZ Literary Awards. 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.

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. She founded the Creative Writing Programme at Whitireia Polytechnic in 1993. 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. 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. She was co-founder of Whitireia Creative Writing Programme's Escalator Press in 2013 and her novel The Score was the first book to be published by this new imprint. In 2016, she helped set up Landing Press.

She worked as a writer at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa for 11 years. She was also heavily involved in refugee resettlement and teaching ESOL (English for speakers of other languages). In the 1980s, she helped set up the Porirua Language Project (now part of English Language Partners). 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. She has frequently worked alongside migrants to help them tell their stories.