Geraldine Brooks (writer)

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This article is about the journalist and author. For the Emmy- and Tony Award-nominated actress, see Geraldine Brooks (actress).
Geraldine Brooks
Born (1955-09-14) 14 September 1955 (age 68)
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation Journalist, writer
Nationality Australian-American
Genre Historical fiction
Spouse Tony Horwitz (1984-present)

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 a United States citizen in 2002.[1][2]

Early life

A native of Sydney, Geraldine Brooks grew up in its inner-west suburb of Ashfield, where she attended Bethlehem College, a secondary school for girls, 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 at New York City's Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism 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]

Career

As a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, she covered crises in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East, 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.[citation needed]

Brooks's 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 inspired by 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. Brook's "The Idea of Home" [107 pages], her 2011 Boyer Lectures given annually on invitation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, reveals her passionate humanist values which inevitably enter her home, literature.

"The Secret Chord" (2015) is a historical novel based on the life of the biblical King David in the period of the Second Iron Age.[9]

Recognition

Works

Novels

Nonfiction

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References

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  2. ↑ Marquis Who's Who (2009). New Providence: Reed Reference Electronic Publishing
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  10. ↑ "Brooks wins Book of the Year award", The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 June 2008
  11. ↑ Althea Peterson, "2009 Helmerich award winner has unusual past", Tulsa World, 19 February 2009.
  12. ↑ http://www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org/2010-lifetime.htm

Further reading

  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Review of Caleb's crossing.
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External links

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