Kirsten Tranter was in a department store shopping for clothes for her five-year-old son when her publisher rang to say her debut book The Legacy was in the running for this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award.
"I was thrilled, surprised and delighted," she says.
"I did not imagine I would be recognised with this sort of attention."
Nine Australian authors, including three women and two debut novelists, have been longlisted from 55 entries for Australia's oldest literary award that recognises excellence in fiction writing and captures a facet of Australian life.
Even though Tranter says this year's $50,000 award is Australia's most prestigious - she feels the Prime Minister's Literary Award, though richer, is still new and so far lacks the same cultural clout - it also makes her think of the film My Brilliant Career, about Miles Franklin's life.
"It's like Judy Davis telling me I'm great," she said with a laugh.
Writing isn't new to Tranter, having grown up in a literary family, with her father a writer and her mother a literary agent.
Now 38, she didn't go straight into writing, taking an academic turn studying in the US for her PhD in English renaissance literature.
She was living in downtown Manhattan when the Twin Towers were attacked and although this is the setting for her novel, she says "I wouldn't say it's a 9/11 novel".
"I always wanted to rewrite The Portrait of a Lady - it always infuriated me because it has this terrible unhappy ending," she told AAP.
The Legacy is a contemporary version of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. Set in Sydney and New York, it concerns a young Australian heiress who falls for a charming American art dealer. She follows him to New York, where she moves in with him, but later disappears along with the World Trade Centre.
The character's estranged friend, the narrator, travels to New York to excavate her life.
"I'd describe it as a literary mystery," says Tranter, who says readers need to pick up her book to discover her fate.
Past Miles Franklin winners Roger McDonald (2000) and Kim Scott (joint winner with Thea Astley in 2006) also made the longlist, along with another debut novelist, UK-born Jon Bauer, who became an Australian citizen this year.
Melina Marchetta, whose first novel Looking for Alibrandi was published to great acclaim in 1992 and transferred to the screen in 2000, has received her first Miles Franklin nomination for The Piper's Son.
The 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist will be announced on April 19 in Sydney and the winner in Melbourne on June 22.
Authors longlisted for the 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Award:
JON BAUER - Rocks in the Belly (Scribe Publications)
HONEY BROWN - The Good Daughter (Viking, an imprint of Penguin)
PATRICK HOLLAND - The Mary Smokes Boys (Transit Lounge Publishing)
MELINA MARCHETTA - The Piper's Son (Viking)
ROGER McDONALD - When Colts Ran Vintage (Random House Australia)
STEPHEN ORR - Time's Long Ruin (Wakefield Press)
KIM SCOTT - That Deadman Dance (Picador)
KIRSTEN TRANTER - The Legacy (4th Estate)
CHRIS WOMERSLEY - Bereft (Scribe Publications)
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