Andrea Goldsmith
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Andrea Goldsmith (born 24 March 1950) is an Australian writer and novelist.
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[edit] Life
Goldsmith was born in Melbourne, Victoria, to an Australian-Jewish family. She started learning the piano as a young child, and music remains an abiding passion. She initially trained as a speech pathologist and worked for several years with children with severe communication impairment until becoming a full-time writer in the late 1980s. From 1987 has taught creative writing at Deakin University.
She travels widely, and London, in particular, figures prominently in her novels. At the same time, she describes herself as 'a deeply Melbourne person'.[citation needed] She lives with the poet Dorothy Porter in Melbourne's inner suburbs.
[edit] Literary career
Andrea Goldsmith has published five novels. Rich in ideas and characterisation, they tell of contemporary life in all its diversity. Narratives of ambition, love, family, art, music and relationships abound in her books.
She also writes literary essays on topics as diverse as Oliver Sacks ('Oliver Sacks: Anthropologist of Mind'), 'The blood-stained imagination', 'Homer and the Holocaust', nuclear physics and life-threatening illness ('Chain Reaction') and Jewish-Australian idenity ('Talmudic Excusrsions'). She is a lively and dramatic performer of her work and reads regularly at venues throughout Australia. She was lecturer in creative writing at Deakin University in Melbourne (1995-8) and while writer-in-residence at La Trobe University she edited an anthology written by a group of people with gambling problems called Calling A Spade A Spade. As well as teaching, she mentors new novelists.
[edit] Awards
| The Miles Franklin Award | The Prosperous Thief, shortlisted 2003 |
| NBC Banjo Awards, NBC Lysbeth Cohen Memorial Prize | Modern Interiors, shortlisted 1993 |
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Novels
- Gracious Living (Penguin, 1990)
- Modern Interiors (Penguin, 1991)
- Facing the Music (Penguin, 1994)
- Under the Knife (Penguin, 1998)
- The Prosperous Thief (Allen&Unwin, 2002)
- Reunion (Forthcoming HarperCollins/4th Estate, 2009).
