Andrea Goldsmith (writer)

Goldsmith was born in Melbourne, Victoria, to an Australian-Jewish family.^[1] She started learning the piano at the age of 8, and music remains an abiding passion.^[1]

Goldsmith 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.^[2]

From 1987 and through the 1990s she taught creative writing at Deakin University, and as of 2021^[update] continues to conduct workshops and mentor new novelists.^[3]

She travels widely, and London, in particular, figures prominently in her novels. At the same time, she describes herself as 'a deeply Melbourne person'.^[4]

She also writes literary essays on topics as diverse as Oliver Sacks ("Oliver Sacks: Anthropologist of Mind"), nuclear physics, life-threatening illness ("Chain Reaction") and Jewish Australian identity ("Talmudic Excursions").^{[citation needed]}

While 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 fiction writers and mentors new novelists.^{[citation needed]}

She has been a guest at all the major literary festivals in Australia, and appeared at the 2009 Sydney Writers' Festival.^{[citation needed]}

• 1993 – Shortlisted, NBC Banjo Awards, NBC Lysbeth Cohen Memorial Prize Modern Interiors^{[citation needed]}
• 2003 – Shortlisted, Miles Franklin Award, for The Prosperous Thief^{[citation needed]}
• 2015 – Winner, Best Writing Award in the Melbourne Prize for Literature, for her 2013 novel The Memory Trap^[5][6]

As of 2019^[update] Goldsmith was living in Clifton Hill, in Melbourne's inner suburbs, in a house she bought with her partner, the poet Dorothy Porter.^[7] She continued to live there following Porter's death in 2008.^[8]