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Goldie Goldbloom Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Goldie Goldbloom

Goldie Goldbloom

Goldie Goldbloom Biography

Goldie Goldbloom is an Australian novelist and short story writer. Her novel The Paperbark Shoe won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Fiction and the Foreword Magazine Novel of the Year. She's been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Dora Maar House-Brown Foundation Fellowship.

She teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago and is the mother of eight children. Goldie raises chickens, trout and organic vegetables at her urban garden.

Goldie Goldbloom's website

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Interview

Goldie Goldbloom chats with Lisa Guidarini about her first novel, The Paperbark Shoe, set in 1940s Australia.

You chose to set the book in your native Australia. Do you believe it would have been as effective if the setting had been, say, the 1930s Dust Bowl in the United States, or was the Australian setting essential?

I'm always excited when someone asks me a question that I haven't been asked before, especially one that makes me think deeply. I am imagining right now, what my novel might have been like set in the US during the 1930s dustbowl. And what I have (ha!) is a failure of imagination. I don't know enough about rural America to write well about it. The red dirt of Australia is still underneath my fingernails. But perhaps you were really asking if someone else, someone American had written this book, could it have been set in the dustbowl? Hmmm. Good question! I once saw a version of Othello set in Manhattan, in modern language, and it was translatable. Themes of isolation and xenophobia and heartbreak and loss are universal, but in a squeaky little corner of my soul I still want to believe that The Paperbark Shoe had to be set in Western Australia, in Wyalkatchem, in 1943.


How long did it take you to write the book? How many drafts did you go through in the process of polishing it?

I read that James ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Goldie Goldbloom at BookBrowse
On Division jacket The Paperbark Shoe jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Goldie Goldbloom but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Jim Crace

    Jim Crace

    Jim Crace is the author of many novels including Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year; shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (2001 National Book ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Paperbark Shoe

    Try:
    Harvest
    by Jim Crace

  • Lloyd Jones

    Lloyd Jones

    Lloyd Jones was born in in Lower Hutt, New Zealand in 1955. His best-known works include Mister Pip, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Book of Fame, winner of numerous ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Paperbark Shoe

    Try:
    Paint Your Wife
    by Lloyd Jones

We recommend 7 similar authors

View all 7 Read-Alikes

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Top Picks

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    Small Rain
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    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
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    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
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    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

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Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
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The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant

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