Publisher’s Pick: Gwen by Goldie Goldbloom

What we love about it: Goldie Goldbloom’s fictional biography Gwen will transport you to Paris in the early 20^th century where the painter Gwen John is living the true bohemian life and losing her heart to one of the most influential artists of the modern age. You may know Gwen John as sister of the painter of Augustus John, or the student, lover and muse of the sculptor and painter Auguste Rodin. you may not know her at all – but her talent was huge and her paintings are extraordinary and, as one of the very few practising women artists of her time, she had the strange power of the truly invisible. For those of you who have read Goldie’s novel The Paperbark Shoe, you will know that nobody but Goldbloom could have written a tale both so strange and so true as Gwen.

Goldie Goldbloom’s short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly and Narrative. Her stories have been translated into over ten languages, and are often reprinted and anthologised. She grew up in Western Australia and, even though she lives in Chicago with her eight children, has never given up her Australian citizenship.

Her work is highly regarded in the USA where her first novel The Paperbark Shoe won the GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction, Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year, Literary Fiction, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Novel Award, Jerusalem Post International Fiction Prize and the Hadassah Brandeis Award

Purchase a copy of Gwen or starting reading here!