Brooks, Geraldine (1955-…), is an Australian American novelist and journalist known for her historical fiction. Brooks was born in Australia. She became an American citizen in 2002, but also retained her Australian citizenship. Brooks has been honored in both countries. Her novel March (2005) won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the United States. In 2016, she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia.
Brooks’s first novel was Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (2001). The story, set in an English village in 1665 and 1666, describes a young woman’s fight to save fellow villagers when the bubonic plague strikes. March is inspired by Brooks’s affection for Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women. The central character in March is Mr. March, the father of the girls in Alcott’s story. March served on the Union side in the American Civil War (1861-1865). The novel describes his life-changing experiences during the conflict.
In People of the Book (2008), her third novel, Brooks explored the fictional history of how an illuminated copy of the Haggadah, a sacred Jewish book, survived from the 1300’s through the 1900’s thanks to people of different faiths who risked their lives to protect it. The novel won the Australian Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literary Fiction Award in 2008. Brooks’s fourth novel, Caleb’s Crossing (2011), is inspired by the life in the 1600’s of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Brooks’s next novel, The Secret Chord (2015), is based on the life of the Biblical King David. Her novel Horse (2022) explores race relations as it follows the life and legacy of a famous racehorse that lived in the 1800’s.
Geraldine Brooks was born on Sept. 14, 1955, in Sydney, Australia. She attended Bethlehem College, a secondary school for girls. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Sydney in 1979. After her graduation, Brooks became a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. In 1982, she won a scholarship to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in the United States, where she earned a master’s degree in 1983.
From 1983 to 1994, Brooks was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, she covered important events in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Brooks has also written several books of nonfiction. She based Nine Parts of Desire (1995) on her experiences interviewing Muslim women in the Middle East. Foreign Correspondence (1998) is a memoir of her childhood in Australia. In The Idea of Home: Boyer Lectures 2011 (2011), Brooks explores the meaning of home in a series of talks for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
