Geraldine Brooks

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues, and later for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, is an international bestseller, and People of the Book is a New York Times bestseller translated into 20 languages.

Her latest novel is Caleb’s Crossing.

From Brooks's Q & A with Dan Eltringham at the Financial Times:

What book changed your life?

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

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What book do you wish you’d written?

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Collected Poems.

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Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?

Barack Obama, so I can berate him to do more about climate change. I don’t think he’d like to sit next to me though.

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How would you earn your living if you had to give up writing?

I’d be a dog-walker.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue