Geraldine Brooks

Brooks was born and raised in Sydney, studied journalism at the University of Sydney and Columbia, and spent a decade as a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent covering wars in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans before turning to historical fiction.

March (2005) imagines the wartime experience of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, as a Union Army chaplain confronting slavery and combat's full brutality far from his family's genteel New England world; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006.

She has continued writing historical novels drawing on meticulous research, including Year of Wonders and People of the Book, dividing her time between Australia and the United States and remaining one of the most widely read historical novelists writing in English.