The Trauma Cleaner (2017) is a biographical book by Australian writer Sarah Krasnostein about the remarkable life of another Australian, Sandra Pankhurst.

Born a boy, Sandra experienced appalling abuse from her adoptive father & was eventually cast out of her home as a teenager.

Sandra lived as a man, married, & had children before transitioning & undergoing gender reassignment surgery in the 1980s. After having worked as a drag queen & a sex worker, she later took on ‘straight’ jobs such as becoming a funeral director & operating a small cleaning business before starting up her specialist trauma cleaning enterprise.

What Sarah Krasnostein has done with The Trauma Cleaner (2017) is weave together stories of Sandra’s trauma & resilience with stories of her her current compassion & caring, showing how surviving profound difficulties allowed Sandra to help others.

The Trauma Cleaner has won many awards including the Victorian Prize for Literature (2018) & the Australian Book Industry Award General Non-Fiction Fiction Book of the year, also in 2018.