Frankie McMillan

Frankie McMillan is a writer of poetry, fiction and flash fiction. She lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Biography Frankie McMillan was born in Christchurch in 1950. She studied education and sociology at the University of Canterbury. In the 1970s, she lived off the land with her young family up the Parapara Valley in Golden Bay, originally in an old shack with no electricity, a wood range and solar panels, and then in a replacement house on the same land.

In 1999 she studied for a MA in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington and later studied theatre at Sydney University. Her work has been published in Best New Zealand Poems as well as on online poetry blogs and in journals including Turbine, Snorkel, JAAM, Trout, takahē, Sweet Mammalian and Cincinnati Review (US). It has also appeared in Poems in the Waiting Room and in anthologies such as The Unbelievable Lightness of Eggs (Hallard, 2006), Essential NZ Short Stories (Vintage, 2009) and Best New Zealand Fiction Anthologies (Vintage 2008 and 2009).

Awards and Prizes Frankie McMillan was awarded the Creative New Zealand Todd New Writers' Bursary in 2005.

She won the 2009 New Zealand Poetry International Competition and the 2013 and 2015 New Zealand Flash Fiction Competition.

In 2014, she was the recipient of the Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury.

She received the University of Auckland residency at the Michael King Writers Centre in 2017, and the NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship in 2019.

My Mother and the Hungarians and other small fictions (Canterbury University Press, 2016) was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The Father of Octopus Wrestling and other small fictions (Canterbury University Press, 2019) was named as one of the ten best New Zealand fiction books of 2019 by The Spinoff.