Geraldine Brooks Essay

GERALDINE BROOKS

Geraldine Brooksis an Australian American journalist and author. She was born on September 14th, 1955, inSydney, Australia. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her novel March in 2005.

Brooks grew up in its inner-west suburb of Ashfield, where she studied in Bethlehem College, a secondary school for girls, and the University of Sydney. She moved to the United States, completing a master 's degree at New York City 's Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1983.

Geraldine 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 as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, receiving the Overseas Press Club 's Hal Boyle Award for "Best Newspaper or Wire Service Reporting from Abroad".In 2006, she wasawarded a fellowship at Harvard University 's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Her first book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994), based on her experiences among Muslim women in the Middle East, and was an international bestseller, translated into 17 languages. Foreign

March (2005), was inspired by her fondness for Louisa May Alcott 's Little Women, which her mother had given her. To connect that memorable reading experience to her new status in 2002 as an American citizen, she researched the Civil War historical setting of Little Women and decided to create a chronicle of wartime service for the "absent father" of the March girls. Some aspects of this chronicle were informed by the life and philosophical writings of the Alcott family patriarch, Amos Bronson Alcott, whom she profiled under the title "Orpheus at the Plow", in the 10 January 2005 issue of The New Yorker, a month before March was published. The parallel novel was generally well received by the critics. It was selected in December 2005 selection by the Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published that year. In April 2006, it won thePulitzer Prize for