Geraldine Brooks

Vera M. Schuyler Fellow
Fiction
Independent Writer

People of the Book

Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Geraldine Brooks is the author of two novels: March (Viking, 2005), which imagines a year at war for the absent father in Louisa May Alcott´s Little Women, and Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (Viking, 2001). In addition, she has published two works of nonfiction: Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Knopf, 1995) and Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal´s Journey from Down Under to All Over (Doubleday, 1998). Brooks also contributes occasionally to publications such as the New Yorker.

During her fellowship year, she intends to complete a novel-in-progress, People of the Book, which traces the history of a Hebrew manuscript created in fourteenth-century Spain, and to commence research on a work of historical fiction based on Harvard´s Indian College in the 1660s.

Brooks has a BA from the University of Sydney and an MS in journalism from Columbia University. She worked for several years as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and has received several awards for her journalism, including an Overseas Press Club award and Columbia University´s Distinguished Alumni Award. In 1999, she won the Nita B. Kibble Literary Award for Australian women´s writing. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow from 1996 to 1998.