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Geraldine Brooks is the author of two acclaimed works of nonfiction, "Nine Parts of Desire" and "Foreign Correspondence." A former war correspondent, her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. (Publisher Provided) Geraldine Brooks was born in Sydney, Australia on September 14, 1955. She attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years. In 1982, she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master's program at Columbia University in New York City. She later worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She has written both fiction and non-fiction books including Year of Wonders, Nine Parts of Desire, and The Secret Chord. She has won several awards including the Nita Kibble Literary Award for Foreign Correspondence, the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for March, the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Christianity Today Book Award for Caleb's Crossing, and the Australian Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literary Fiction Award in 2008 for People of the Book. (Bowker Author Biography) — biography from People of the Book… (more)
Geraldine Brooks (born 14 September 1955) is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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. 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. The following year, in the Southern France artisan village of Tourrettes-sur-Loup, she married American journalist Tony Horwitz and converted to Judaism.
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". In 2006, she was awarded a fellowship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
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.
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