Enza Gandolfo

Enza Gandolfo writes Australian fiction attentive to class, memory, work, and the afterlife of public tragedy. The Bridge links two disasters associated with Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge: the 1970 collapse that killed thirty-five workers and a fatal car crash in 2009. Through families marked by those events, the novel examines grief, guilt, responsibility, and the stories communities preserve about loss. Scribe published the book in 2018, and it was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award. Gandolfo’s earlier novel Swimming was shortlisted in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize regional debut category for South East Asia and the Pacific. Her Victoria University career included creative-writing instruction, and she became an honorary professor while contributing to research and editorial work concerning women, migration, and literature. The Bridge brings those interests together without reducing history to background, showing how industrial memory and present-day choices can occupy the same city and shape lives across generations.