New Zealand Writers

JAGOSE, Annamarie

The stories and the novel work with the fragility of relationships, the ambivalence and imperfection of our efforts at communication.

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Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998), pp. 265-66. Entry written by Ronda Cooper [About the Companion entries]

JAGOSE, Annamarie (1965– ), academic and fiction writer, was born in Ashburton, studied at Victoria University of Wellington (PhD 1992) and then moved to a lectureship in English at Melbourne University. Her published books began with Lesbian Utopics (1994), theoretical academic essays on the ‘cultural space’ of the lesbian, and a well-received novel, In Translation (1994). Numerous short stories have appeared in journals and in collections such as New Women’s Fiction 3 (1989), Cathie Dunsford’s The Exploding Frangipani: Lesbian Writing from Australia and New Zealand (1990) and Speaking with the Sun: New Stories by Australian and New Zealand Writers (1991). The stories and the novel work with the fragility of relationships, the ambivalence and imperfection of our efforts at communication. ‘Lulu’s Fourth Birthday’ and ‘Charades’ deal with a linguistic researcher, experimentally training a chimpanzee in sign language. Dialogue with the humans in her life—friends, colleagues and a grimly sulky lover—is more complicated and less successful. The multi-layered In Translation centres on the actual work of translating a manuscript from one language into another, a metamorphosis that eventually takes on a momentum of its own. Continually shifting and changing, moving from a Kelburn garden to a courtyard in an Indian city, Jagose’s novel addresses issues of identity and creativity, sensual attraction and cool indifference, emotional need and independence. Her second academic book is on ‘Queer Theory’, and a second novel, Lulu: A Romance, was published in 1998. In Translation won the NZSA Best First Book Award. Both In Translation and Lulu are published in Australia.

Updated Information

Annamarie Jagose's novel Slow Water (Victoria University Press, 2003) received the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004.