Fellowship / Fellows

Geraldine Brooks

  • 2005–2006
  • Fiction & Poetry
  • Vera M. Schuyler Fellow
  • Independent Writer
Headshot of Geraldine Brooks
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

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.

Journalist, Novelist, Witness (Harvard Gazette, 11/30/18)

Making Fiction from Fact (Harvard Gazette, 4/27/06)

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