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Geraldine Brooks (born 14 September 1955) is an Australian journalist and author whose 2005 novel, March, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. While still retaining her Australian passport, she became an American citizen in 2002.
Brooks' first book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994), based on her experiences among Muslim women in the Middle East, was an international bestseller, translated into 17 languages. Foreign Correspondence (1997), which won the Nita Kibble Literary Award for women's writing, was a memoir and travel adventure about a childhood enriched by penpals from around the world, and her adult quest to find them.
Her first novel, Year of Wonders, published in 2001, became an international bestseller. Set in 1666, the story depicts a young woman's battle to save fellow villagers as well as her own soul when the bubonic plague suddenly strikes her small Derbyshire village of Eyam.
Published in late February 2005, her next novel, March, found its inspiration in memories of its author's early adolescence when her mother, Gloria, a journalist and radio announcer, gave her, when she was ten, a copy of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. As a way of making a personal connection from 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 March girls' absent father suggested, in some aspects, 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 January 10 issue of The New Yorker, a month before March's publication. The parallel novel was generally well received by the critics, resulting in its December 2005 selection by the Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published during the year and, in April 2006, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
She attached tangible meaning to her adopted Jewish heritage in her subsequent work, People of the Book, published in January 2008, a fictionalised account of the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, which grew out of her reporting, for The New Yorker, on human interest stories emerging in the aftermath of the 1991 95 breakup of Yugoslavia. The novel won both the Australian Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literary Fiction Award in 2008.
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