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Geraldine Brooks

b. September 14, 1955

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Geraldine Brooks until we are able to commission a full entry.

Journalist and writer Geraldine Brooks.

Photo by Randi Baird.

Courtesy of GeraldineBrooks.com.

Geraldine Brooks had a stellar career as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, but it was her 2005 novel March that won her a Pulitzer Prize. Brooks graduated from the University of Sydney and reported for the Sydney Morning Herald before moving to New York to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism in 1983. A year later, she married fellow journalist Tony Horwitz and converted to Judaism. As a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, she covered conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans and was honored with the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award in 1990. In 1994, she published her first novel, Nine Parts of Desire, based on women she had known in the Middle East. Her later novels include 2001’s Year of Wonders, about the Black Plague, 2005’s March, retelling Little Women from the father’s perspective, 2008’s People of the Book, a saga of the Sarajevo Haggadah spanning centuries and continents, 2011’s Caleb’s Crossing, about the first Native American to graduate from Harvard, 2015’s The Secret Chord, based on the life of King David, and 2022’s Horse, a novel about the racehorse Lexington. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Australian Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literary Fiction Award for People of the Book, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Horse, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also written and spoken on humanitarian issues and in 2017 wrote an article for the anthology Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, based on her 2016 travels to Israel with the organization Breaking the Silence. 

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Geraldine Brooks." (Viewed on December 22, 2024) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/brooks-geraldine>.