Geraldine Brooks
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw a generation of journalists cross over into literary fiction, bringing the habits of on-the-ground reporting to the longer form of the novel. Geraldine Brooks, born in Sydney, Australia, on September 14, 1955, became one of the more prominent figures in that transition, working across both journalism and fiction while writing in English throughout her career.
Brooks was educated at the University of Sydney, Bethlehem College, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a training path that fed directly into her dual career as a journalist and novelist. Her work in both fields drew sustained attention, and the honors she accumulated reflected recognition from a range of institutions. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, along with the Helmerich Award and the Nita Kibble Literary Awards. Her home country also acknowledged her contributions: she was named an Officer of the Order of Australia and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney.
That combination of journalistic grounding and novelistic range earned Brooks a durable presence in Australian and international literary circles. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction remains the most prominent marker of the critical standing her work achieved, placing her among the recognized figures of contemporary English-language fiction. Her honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney, the institution where her formal education began, offered a concrete closing of a circle that stretched from Sydney through Columbia and across a career built on reporting and storytelling alike.
Quotes by Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brooks's insights on:
Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?'
Yes, it seems we've got this mutant gene in our human personality that makes us susceptible to this same kind of mistake over and over again. It's really uncanny how we build these beautiful multicultural edifices and then allow this switch to be flipped and everybody goes, 'Oh, the other, get them out of here.'
The word for mother, umm, is the root of the words for “source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion.” In.
When you’re writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can’t go. You can’t suppose. You can’t imagine. And I think there’s something in human nature that wants to finish the story.
You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, ‘How awful!’ and then you got up and made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee.” I flinched when he said that. It was a pretty accurate description.
You can’t write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I’m very interested in what religion does to us – its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.
How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when dragged out into the field of actual endeavor. pg. 65.
We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.
Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.
All this is true and certain. But what I do not know is this: which home welcomed him, at the end. Whichever it was – the celestial English heaven of seraphim, cherubim and ophanim, or Kietan’s warm and fertile place away in the southwest, I believe that his song was powerful enough for Joel to hear and to follow him there.