Biography
Jane Turner Goldsmith was born near the beaches of Adelaide, but spent her Enid Blyton years in Buckinghamshire, England, before returning to study English, French and Psychology at Adelaide University. Jane spent the eighties travelling around the world, first in Europe and later the South Pacific, where she discovered New Caledonia, a country she ended up living in for four years. In the early nineties Jane returned to Adelaide once again and completed her Masters in Psychology. Her interest in people's relationships and motivations has inspired her work as well as her writing, and throughout her life she has had short stories and poetry published in competitions. It was only when her 40th birthday loomed, however, that she decided to stop procrastinating and start writing the novel she’d imagined since she first visited New Caledonia (Poinciana). In 2009 she moved from Adelaide once again, and now lives on the South Coast of NSW with her family.
Poinciana (Wakefield Press, 2006) is Jane’s first novel, and was short-listed in the 2007 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize First Novel Category (Asia/South-Pacific Region), and the 2007 SA Writer’s Festival People’s Choice Award. Her other publications are a children’s novel, Gone Fishing, (Macmillan Education, 2005), and an edited anthology, Adopting: Parent’s Stories (Wakefield Press, 2007). She is currently working on her second novel (For Good), which she commenced at the Varuna Writer’s Centre in the Blue Mountains. Jane was awarded an Australia Council Literature Board’s grant for a Developing Writer in 2007, and in November of that year was invited to attend the Salon International du Livre Océanien in New Caledonia as a guest speaker.