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Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, attending Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues.
In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master's program at Columbia University in New York City. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 1990, with her husband Tony Horwitz, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War. The following year they received a citation for excellence for their series, "War and Peace." In 2006 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. She returned to Harvard as a Visiting Lecturer in 2021.
She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her novels People of the Book, Caleb's Crossing and The Secret Chord all were New York Times Bestsellers. Her first novel, Year of Wonders is an an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages and currently optioned for a limited series by Olivia Coleman's production company. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire, Foreign Correspondence and The Idea of Home.
Brooks married fellow journalist and author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-Loup France in 1984 and were together until his sudden death in 2019. They have two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, She now lives with a dog named Bear and a mare named Valentine by an old mill pond on Martha's Vineyard and spends as much time as she can in Australia. In 2016, she was named an Officer in the Order of Australia.
Geraldine Brooks's website
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Two interviews with Geraldine Brooks about Year of Wonders and People of the Book.
A Conversation with Geraldine Brooks about People of the Book
Your previous two novels are set during Europe's plague years and the
American Civil War. Now, you've created an epic story about art and religious
persecution. What is it that draws you to a particular subject, or a particular
historical era?
I love to find stories from the past where we can know something, but not
everything; where there is enough of a historical record to have left us with an
intriguing factual scaffolding, but where there are also enough unknowable voids
in that record to allow room for imagination to work.
What do you think it is about the real Sarajevo Haggadah that has
allowed it to survive the centuries?
It's a fascinating question: Why did this little book always find its
protectors when so many others did not? It is interesting to me that the book
was created in a period—convivencia Spain—when diversity was tolerated,
even somewhat celebrated, and that it found its way centuries later to a similar
place, Sarajevo. So even when hateful forces arose in those societies and
crushed the spirit of multiethnic, ...
Novelist, biographer, and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London on October 5, 1949.
He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, and studied at Yale University as a Mellon Fellow, where he completed Notes for a New Culture: ...
(more)
If you enjoyed:
March
Try:
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
by Peter Ackroyd
Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; The Wrong End of the Telescope; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize. (more)
If you enjoyed:
People of the Book
Try:
The Hakawati
by Rabih Alameddine
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