One of New Zealand’s own is short-listed for Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, in a line-up that’s been dubbed its strongest shortlist in history.

New Zealand-born academic Annamarie Jagose is one of three represented by Random House Australia, with the other two being Nobel Prize winner J.M Coetzee (for Elizabeth Costello), and two-time Booker and three-time Miles Franklin Award winner Peter Carey (for My Life as a Fake).

Jagose’s third novel, Slow Water is based on a gruelling three-and-a half-month sea voyage by William Yate in 1836, from Gravesend to Sydney, in which he participates in a love affair with the third mate. ‘The historical record doesn’t say anything about whether or not these two men have sex with each other,’ Jagose says. ‘My novel doesn’t have that kind of reticence...’. Oo-er! Perhaps that’s why Professor Webby (one of the judges) said it passed her ‘bus stop’ test. She was so absorbed reading Slow Water on her bus home that she missed her stop.

Annamarie Jagose’s diverse body of work includes social explorations such as Lesbian Utopics (1994) and Queer Theory (1996). Her short stories have appeared in several journals and collections, and her previous novels include In Translation (1994), which won the NZSA Best First Book Award; and Lulu: A Romance, was published in 1998. She was born in Ashburton, studied at Victoria University of Wellington (PhD 1992) and then took up lecturing in English at Melbourne University. She is Associate Professor of Film, TV and Media Studies at Auckland University, and recently participated in Writers and Readers Week as part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington.

As for the other nominees: Penguin Australia is represented by Peter Goldsworthy's Three Dog Night; Virago by Shirley Hazzard’s first book in twenty years, The Great Fire; and Picador by Melbourne author Elliot Perlman's second novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity.

The award, worth $42,000 this year, will be presented on June 17.