Geraldine Brooks (writer)

Geraldine Brooks (born 14 September 1955) is an Australian-American journalist and author whose 2005 novel, March, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. While retaining her Australian passport, she became an American citizen in 2002.^[1][2]

Biographical details

A native of Sydney, Geraldine Brooks grew up in its inner-west suburb of Ashfield, where she attended the all-girls' Bethlehem College and the University of Sydney. Following graduation, she was a rookie reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and, after winning a Greg Shackleton Memorial Scholarship, moved to the United States, completing a Master's degree in journalism at New York City's Columbia University in 1983.^[3] The following year, in the Southern France artisan village of Tourrettes-sur-Loup, she married American journalist Tony Horwitz, and converted to his religion, Judaism.^[4] As a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, with the stories from the Persian Gulf, which she and her husband reported in 1990, receiving the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award for "Best Newspaper or Wire Service Reporting from Abroad".^[5] In 2006 she was awarded a fellowship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Brooks and her husband are the parents of two sons, Nathaniel and Bizuayehu, and divide their time between homes in Sydney and the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard.

Works

Brooks' first book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994), based on her experiences among Muslim women in the Middle East, was an international bestseller, translated into 17 languages. Foreign Correspondence (1997), which won the Nita Kibble Literary Award for women's writing, was a memoir and travel adventure about a childhood enriched by penpals from around the world, and her adult quest to find them.

Her first novel, Year of Wonders, published in 2001, became an international bestseller. Set in 1666, the story depicts a young woman's battle to save fellow villagers as well as her own soul when the bubonic plague suddenly strikes her small Derbyshire village of Eyam.

Her next novel, March (2005), was inspired by her fondness for Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, which her mother had given her. To connect that memorable reading experience to her new status in 2002 as an American citizen, she researched the Civil War historical setting of Little Women and decided to create a chronicle of wartime service for the "absent father" of the March girls. Some aspects of this chronicle were informed by the life and philosophical writings of the Alcott family patriarch, Amos Bronson Alcott, whom she profiled under the title "Orpheus at the Plow", in the 10 January 2005 issue of The New Yorker, a month before March was published. The parallel novel was generally well received by the critics. It was selected in December 2005 selection by the Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published that year. In April 2006, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.^[6]

In her next novel, People of the Book (2008), Brooks explored a fictionalized history of the Sarajevo Haggadah. This novel was inspired by her reporting (for The New Yorker) of human interest stories emerging in the aftermath of the 1991–95 breakup of Yugoslavia.^[7] The novel won both the Australian Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literary Fiction Award in 2008.^[8]

Her 2011 novel Caleb's Crossing is based on the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a Wampanoag convert to Christianity who was the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College, an achievement of the seventeenth century.

Awards and nominations

• 2006: Pulitzer Prize for March
• 2008: Australian Publishers Association's Literary Fiction Book of the Year for People of the Book^[9]
• 2009: Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award^[10]

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Novels

• Year of Wonders. 2001. ISBN 0-670-91021-X. 
• March. 2005. ISBN 0-670-03335-9. 
• People of the Book. 2008. ISBN 0-00-717743-7. 
• Caleb's Crossing. 2011. ISBN 9780670021048. 

Non fiction

• Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. 1994. ISBN 0-385-47576-4. 
• Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over. 1997. ISBN 0-385-48269-8. 
• Boyer Lectures 2011: The Idea of Home (or "At Home in the World"). 2011. ISBN 978-0-7333-3025-4. 

Reviews and Criticism of Brooks' work

Caleb's Crossing

• Sophie Cunningham (Jun 2011). "Caleb goes to Harvard". Australian Book Review (332): 55–56. 

References

Notes

External links

• Geraldine Brooks official website
• Geraldine Brooks interviewed by Ramona Koval on ABC Radio National's The Book Show, regarding her novel, People of the Book
• Write TV Public Television Interview with Geraldine Brooks
• "A Muslim Response to 'Nine Parts of Desire'", Resources for and about Muslim Women, Jannah.org
• Geraldine Brooks' Civil War March, NPR
• Trisha Ping, Interview: "An Idealist at War", Book Page, 2005
• 2008 Interview: Geraldine Brooks, Littoral, blog -Key West Literary Seminar
• Audio: Geraldine Brooks reading from March, Key West Literary Seminar, 2009
• Geraldine Brooks at the Internet Movie Database