Andrea Goldsmith (born 1950) is an Australian writer and novelist.

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 suffering from severe communication impairment until becoming a full-time writer in the late 1980s. From 1987 and through the 1990s she taught creative writing at Deakin University, and she continues to conduct workshops and mentor new novelists. She travels widely, and London, in particular, figures prominently in her novels. At the same time, she describes herself as 'a deeply Melbourne person'. Goldsmith lives in Clifton Hill, in Melbourne's inner suburbs, in a house she bought with her partner, the poet

Dorothy Porter Dorothy Featherstone Porter (26 March 1954 – 10 December 2008) was an Australian poet. She was a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. Early life Porter was born in Sydney. Her father was barrister ...

. She continued to live there following Porter's death in 2008.

Literary career

Andrea Goldsmith has published eight 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'), nuclear physics and life-threatening illness ('Chain Reaction') and Jewish-Australian identity ('Talmudic Excursions'). She is a lively and dramatic performer of her work and reads regularly at venues throughout Australia. She was a lecturer in creative writing at Deakin University in Melbourne (1995-8) and while as a 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''. She conducts workshops and short courses for writers of fiction, and she mentors new novelists. She has been a guest at all the major literary festivals in Australia, and appeared at the 2009 Sydney Writers' Festival.

Awards

* 1993 — NBC Banjo Awards, NBC Lysbeth Cohen Memorial Prize ''Modern Interiors'', shortlisted * 2003 —

Miles Franklin Award The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–195 ...

''The Prosperous Thief'', shortlisted 2003

Bibliography

Novels

* ''Gracious Living'' (Penguin,

1990 File:1990 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1990 FIFA World Cup is played in Italy; The Human Genome Project is launched; Voyager I takes the famous Pale Blue Dot image- speaking on the fragility of Humankind, humanity on Earth, Astroph ...

) * ''Modern Interiors'' (Penguin,

1991 File:1991 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Boris Yeltsin, elected as Russia's first president, waves the new flag of Russia after the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, orchestrated by Soviet hardliners; Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Phil ...

) * ''Facing the Music'' (Penguin,

1994 File:1994 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1994 Winter Olympics are held in Lillehammer, Norway; The Kaiser Permanente building after the 1994 Northridge earthquake; A model of the MS Estonia, which Sinking of the MS Estonia, sank in ...

) * ''Under the Knife'' (Penguin,

1998 1998 was designated as the ''International Year of the Ocean''. Events January * January 6 – The '' Lunar Prospector'' spacecraft is launched into orbit around the Moon, and later finds evidence for frozen water, in soil in permanently ...

) * ''

The Prosperous Thief ''The Prosperous Thief'' is a 2002 novel by Australian novelist Andrea Goldsmith. Plot summary Alice Lewin has survived the Second World War and, as an adult, visits the Kindertransport archive where she learns of a possible relative. She tra ...

'' (Allen&Unwin,

2002 File:2002 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 2002 Winter Olympics are held in Salt Lake City; Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and her daughter Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon die; East Timor gains East Timor independence, indepe ...

) * ''Reunion'' (HarperCollins,

2009 File:2009 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: The vertical stabilizer of Air France Flight 447 is pulled out from the Atlantic Ocean; Barack Obama becomes the first African American to become President of the United States; 2009 Iran ...

) * ''The Memory Trap'' (Fourth Estate,

2013 File:2013 Events Collage V2.png, From left, clockwise: Edward Snowden becomes internationally famous for leaking classified NSA wiretapping information; Typhoon Haiyan kills over 6,000 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia; The Dhaka garment fact ...

) * ''Invented Lives'' (Scribe, 2019)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Goldsmith, Andrea 1950 births Living people Australian women novelists Australian lesbian writers Australian LGBT novelists 20th-century Australian novelists 21st-century Australian novelists 20th-century Australian women writers 21st-century Australian women writers Jewish Australian writers Jewish novelists LGBT Jews Writers from Melbourne Deakin University faculty 21st-century LGBT people