Geraldine Brooks

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended 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 the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March, which develops the character of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, using the letters and journals of Alcott's father as a source. Her novel Year of Wonders is an international bestseller, and has been translated into seventeen languages. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her newest novel, People of the Book (2008), traces the journey of a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript.

Brooks married American author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-loup, France, in 1984. They have one child and three dogs, and divide their time between homes in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, and Sydney, Australia.

Bibliography:

People of the Book (2008)

March (2005)

Year of Wonders (2001)

Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over (1997)

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. (1994)

Links:

Powell's interview
NPR article and audio
Geraldine Brooks's website
Littoral interview