Irma Gold

Irma (pronounced Ear-ma) is an award-winning author and editor. Her debut novel, The Breaking, won the NSW Writers Centre Varuna Fellowship and was awarded development grants by artsACT and CAPO. It was published by MidnightSun in March 2021 to wide critical acclaim. It won a Canberra Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted for the ACT Notable Award for Fiction.

Irma’s debut collection of short fiction, Two Steps Forward (Affirm Press), was selected from over 450 manuscripts to be published as the final in the Long Story Shorts series of six short fiction collections. Two Steps Forward was critically acclaimed and was shortlisted for or won a number of awards.

Her short fiction has also been widely published in journals, including Meanjin, Island, Westerly, Review of Australian Fiction and Going Down Swinging, and in anthologies, including the tenth anniversary edition of Award Winning Australian Stories and Australian Love Stories, edited by Cate Kennedy.

Irma is also the author of five picture books for children, most recently Where the Heart Is (EK Books), which was read on the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson’s, Storytime channel and won the ACT Notable Award Children’s category, and Seree’s Story (Walker Books). Her next book is Finding Home, forthcoming with MidnightSun.

As an editor Irma has worked both in-house and freelance. She currently works freelance for publishers big and small, and until recently was Convener of Editing at the University of Canberra for a decade. Irma has edited a wide range of fiction, nonfiction, YA and children’s books, and is the commissioning editor of a number of anthologies, including The Sound of Silence, winner of the ACT Writing and Publishing Awards for Nonfiction, and The Invisible Thread, an official publication of the National Year of Reading 2012 and the Centenary of Canberra 2013 which anthologises a century of literature by writers who have called Canberra home, and includes writers like Alex Miller, Kate Grenville, Marion Halligan, Roger McDonald, Omar Musa, Judith Wright and Les Murray.

Irma is Co-host of the writing podcast, Secrets from the Green Room, with Karen Viggers, featuring a range of authors, including Charlotte Wood, Craig Silvey, Sofie Laguna, Nikki Gemmell, James Bradley, and many others.