| Andrea Goldsmith | |
| Birth Place: | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Occupation: | Writer, novelist |
| Language: | English |
| Nationality: | Australian |
| Notableworks: | The Prosperous Thief (2002) |
Andrea Goldsmith is an Australian writer and novelist, known for her 2002 novel The Prosperous Thief.
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 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").
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.
She has been a guest at all the major literary festivals in Australia, and appeared at the 2009 Sydney Writers' Festival.
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.