Andrea Goldsmith

Andrea Goldsmith is an Australian writer and novelist, known for her 2002 novel The Prosperous Thief.

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

From 1987 and through the 1990s she taught creative writing at Deakin University, and 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'.

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.

Awards 1993 – Shortlisted, NBC Banjo Awards, NBC Lysbeth Cohen Memorial Prize Modern Interiors 2003 – Shortlisted, Miles Franklin Award, for The Prosperous Thief 2015 – Winner, Best Writing Award in the Melbourne Prize for Literature, for her 2013 novel The Memory Trap

Personal life Goldsmith was living in Clifton Hill, in Melbourne's inner suburbs, in a house she bought with her partner, the poet Dorothy Porter. She continued to live there following Porter's death in 2008.

Selected works 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 (Harper Collins, 2009) The Memory Trap (Fourth Estate, 2013) Invented Lives (Scribe, 2019) The Buried Life (Transit Lounge, 2025)