Goldie Goldbloom is the author of The Paperbark Shoe.

Gin, the albino, marries to escape the confines of an asylum. Toad, a little man who wears corsets, marries to prove his manhood. Together they are freaks – feared and ridiculed by the remote farming community in which they live. Into their lives come two Italian POWs bringing music, sensuality and a love that will fan the flames of small town bigotry.

Goldbloom's short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly and Narrative and won the Jerusalem Post International Fiction Prize. Her stories have been translated into over ten languages, and are often reprinted and anthologised. The USA version of her novel; Toads’ Museum of Freaks and Wonders, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ (AWP) Novel Award in 2008 and as a result will be published in the USA in early 2010. Her non-fiction story ‘You Lose These’ is forthcoming in a Random House anthology that won the pre-publication Hadassah Brandeis Award.

She grew up in Western Australia and, even though she lives in Chicago with her eight children, has never given up her Australian citizenship.

Awards

• Jerusalem Post International Fiction Prize
• Association of Writers and Writing Programs’(AWP) Novel Award, (2008)
• Hadassah Brandeis Award