Recent from talks
Geraldine Brooks (writer)
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Geraldine Brooks (writer)
Geraldine Brooks AO (born 14 September 1955) is an Australian-American journalist and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 2005 novel March.
Geraldine Brooks was born on 14 September 1955. A native of Sydney, Geraldine Brooks grew up in its inner-west suburb of Ashfield. Her father, Lawrie Brooks, was an American big-band singer who was stranded in Adelaide on a tour of Australia when his manager absconded with the band's pay; he decided to remain in Australia, and became a newspaper sub-editor. Her mother Gloria, from Boorowa, was a public relations officer with radio station 2GB in Sydney.
Brooks attended Bethlehem College, a Catholic secondary school for girls, and then 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.
In 1984, in the Southern France village of Tourrettes-sur-Loup, she married American journalist Tony Horwitz and converted to Judaism.
As a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Brooks covered crises in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. The stories from the Persian Gulf that she and her husband reported in 1990 earned the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award for "Best Newspaper or Wire Service Reporting from Abroad".
Brooks's first book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994), based on her experiences among Muslim women in the Middle East, was an international bestseller.[citation needed] It was 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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 Plough", in the 10 January 2005 issue of The New Yorker, a month before March was published. The parallel novel received a mixed reaction from critics, but was nonetheless selected in December 2005 by The Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published that year, and in April 2006, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was eligible for the prize by virtue of her American citizenship, and was the first Australian to win the prize.[citation needed]
Hub AI
Geraldine Brooks (writer) AI simulator
(@Geraldine Brooks (writer)_simulator)
Geraldine Brooks (writer)
Geraldine Brooks AO (born 14 September 1955) is an Australian-American journalist and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 2005 novel March.
Geraldine Brooks was born on 14 September 1955. A native of Sydney, Geraldine Brooks grew up in its inner-west suburb of Ashfield. Her father, Lawrie Brooks, was an American big-band singer who was stranded in Adelaide on a tour of Australia when his manager absconded with the band's pay; he decided to remain in Australia, and became a newspaper sub-editor. Her mother Gloria, from Boorowa, was a public relations officer with radio station 2GB in Sydney.
Brooks attended Bethlehem College, a Catholic secondary school for girls, and then 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.
In 1984, in the Southern France village of Tourrettes-sur-Loup, she married American journalist Tony Horwitz and converted to Judaism.
As a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Brooks covered crises in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. The stories from the Persian Gulf that she and her husband reported in 1990 earned the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award for "Best Newspaper or Wire Service Reporting from Abroad".
Brooks's first book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994), based on her experiences among Muslim women in the Middle East, was an international bestseller.[citation needed] It was 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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 Plough", in the 10 January 2005 issue of The New Yorker, a month before March was published. The parallel novel received a mixed reaction from critics, but was nonetheless selected in December 2005 by The Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published that year, and in April 2006, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was eligible for the prize by virtue of her American citizenship, and was the first Australian to win the prize.[citation needed]
Recent media