Another gold star for Goldbloom

The North American edition of Goldie Goldbloom’s novel The Paperbark Shoe won the 2011 GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction in the USA today.

This is the second North American award for Goldbloom’s novel about Italian POWs in the Australian outback during World War II.

Speaking from a snowed-in writers’ retreat in North Carolina, Goldbloom said she was looking forward to the part of her prize that involved visiting the Great Lakes Colleges to meet and talk about writing with students and faculty members.

‘I’m very excited to receive an award previously won by such amazing writers as Jane Hamilton, Louise Erdrich and Alice Munro,’ said Goldbloom.

‘Those are writers I’ve always looked up to and it’s a bit intimidating,’ she said.

The GLCA judges said The Paperbark Shoe (known as Toads’ Museum of Freaks and Wonders in the USA) included ‘stunning descriptions of place’ with characters that were ‘both quirky and well-grounded’ whose ‘many eccentricities make the novel both distinctive and compelling’.

The Paperbark Shoe was published by Fremantle Press after it won the 2008 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Novel Award.

Goldbloom is an expatriate Australian living in Chicago. Her short story collection, You Lose These (Fremantle Press), is scheduled for Australian publication in June 2011.

The Paperbark Shoe is available in all good bookstores and www.fremantlepress.com.au

About the Award
Now in its 42nd year, the GLCA New Writers Award confers recognition on promising writers who have published a first volume in one of the three genres. Winning writers receive invitations to visit GLCA member colleges, where they give readings, meet and talk about writing with students and faculty members. More information is available here