Annamarie Jagose |
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Annamarie Jagose was born in 1965 in Ashburton, New Zealand. She
returned to Auckland in 2003, after more than a decade of living
in Melbourne, and is currently Associate Professor in the Department
of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland.
Annamarie has written three novels. The first, In Translation
(1994), is about a love triangle sustained between India and New
Zealand via airmail dispatches of the translation-in-progress of
a Japanese novel. In Translation won the PEN Society of Authors
Best First Fiction prize in 1994. The second, Lulu: A Romance
(1998), was inspired by accounts of language acquisition experiments
with chimpanzees in post-war America. It is about a couple raising
a chimpanzee in their home, their domestic life transformed by the
unpredictable shifts of affection and desire that get played out
around her.
Slow Water is Annamarie’s third novel, her first foray into historical
fiction. Based on a true story, Slow
Water is a poised and elegant novel of the highest order
with its commitment to historical accuracy exquisitely balanced
by its modern attention to eroticism and narrative suspense. Annamarie
worked full-time on the novel for more than a year in order to immerse
herself in the everyday business of an early nineteenth-century
sea voyage.
In 2004, Slow Water won New Zealand’s major fiction prize, the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The judges called Slow Water "an unusual and unusually satisfying work of fiction" by one of "New Zealand's best novelists".
Slow Water also won a prestigious Australian prize, the
Victorian
Premier's Literary Award for Fiction in 2004. The judges report
that "Annamarie Jagose's impressively researched novel Slow
Water
recreates a boat journey to Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s
with a remarkable precision of detail and authenticity of language.
At the same time, it performs an exciting intervention into how
we might imagine the histories of European colonization, and reflects
on a famous gay scandal of the era from both white and Maori perspectives.
Jagose switches effortlessly between the points of view of her many
characters as she carefully unfolds her love story with touching
humanity and sympathetic humour".
Annamarie’s novel was one of three books shortlisted in 2004
for Australia’s premier literary prize, the Australian
Miles Franklin Literary Award.
In addition to her fiction, Annamarie is the author of three scholarly
works in lesbian literary studies and queer critical theory and
co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.