Geraldine Brooks at a Glance

Full Name: Geraldine Brooks

How to Pronounce: JER-uhl-deen BROOKS

Born: September 14, 1955

Nationality: Australia, United States

Education:

• University of Sydney (BA, Government and Fine Arts)
• Columbia University (MA, Journalism)

Genres:

• Historical fiction
• Literary fiction

Biography & Background

Geraldine Brooks Biography

Geraldine Brooks is an acclaimed Australian American writer and journalist. Raised in Sydney, she began her career writing for her hometown paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, before a scholarship brought her to study and work in the United States. There, she became an international correspondent for The Wall Street Journal; her experiences in the Middle East and the Balkans would inform later works like 2008’s People of the Book and 1994’s Nine Parts of Desire, a work of nonfiction about women’s experiences in Muslim societies. It was while working as a journalist that Brooks met her husband, Tony Horwitz (1958-2019), with whom she had two sons. She currently lives in Martha’s Vineyard but visits Australia frequently.

Brooks published her debut novel, Year of Wonders, in 2001; she had a young child at the time and was searching for a project that would not require her to be away from home for long stretches of time (Daqqa, Hanna.