Book Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose fiction brings history vividly to life. Before turning to novels she filed stories from Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, and her 1990 Persian Gulf coverage with Tony Horwitz won the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award. Her first book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994), drew on her time among Muslim women in the Middle East, became an international bestseller. Her memoir Foreign Correspondence (1997), about childhood pen pals and her later search for them, won the Nita Kibble Literary Award. She moved into fiction with Year of Wonders (2001), the story of a young woman in a Derbyshire village struck by plague in 1666. Her second novel, March (2005), imagines the wartime life of the absent father from Little Women and won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. People of the Book (2008) and Horse (2022) followed, and in 2025 she published 107 Days. Brooks received the Helmerich Award in 2009 and was named an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016. She speaks compellingly on storytelling, history and life as a foreign correspondent.