TCCL News & Events

Oklahoma Magazine
November 2009
By Jackie Hill

A Puritan minister … a Wampanoag medicine man … Caleb’s Crossing, Geraldine Brooks’ next novel, will take readers on a riveting ride back to 17th-century Massachusetts when English settlers first encountered Native Americans.

"It will be just about written this time next year, but I am too superstitious to say anything more about it just yet," said Brooks, who will be in Tulsa Dec. 4 and 5 to accept the Tulsa Library Trust’s 2009 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award.

As a Helmerich award winner, Brooks said she is in awe to be included in such a distinguished circle of writers (i.e. John Grisham, David McCullough, Ray Bradbury, Eudora Welty, etc.)

The Tulsa Library Trust and Tulsa City-County Library are honoring Brooks with the Helmerich award for her major contribution to the field of literature and letters.

Brooks fell in the love with the written word when she was 8 years old, deciding then what she would be when she grew up.   
"I can date it precisely to a visit I made to see my dad at work," said Brooks. "He was a proofreader for a Sydney (Australia) newspaper. He took me down to the pressroom as the afternoon editions were rolling, and pulled one of the papers off the conveyor belt. I’ll never forget it – the paper was warm – literally ‘hot off the presses.’ I thought, ‘I’m the first one in this city to read this news,’ and from that moment I knew I wanted to grow up to write it."

Brooks’ childhood dream came to fruition first as a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, next as the Middle East bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and then the Journal’s United Nations correspondent.

The switch to fiction came much later for Brooks.

"I’d been a foreign correspondent for years and years, and written two nonfiction books (Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal‘s Journey From Down Under to All Over), but I really had no idea a novelist dwelt inside until my son was born, and I had to keep still in one place for the first time in a decade," said Brooks. "That’s when I started hearing voices from the past and wanting to tell their stories."

Her first story was the 2001 international best-seller Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague,the true story of the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, where villagers voluntarily quarantined themselves when bubonic plague struck in 1666.

Her second novel, March, a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women from the point of view of the girls’ absent father, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. Brooks’ most recent novel, People of the Book, traces the perilous journey of a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript from Spain to the ruins of Sarajevo.

Brooks will receive the Helmerich award at a black-tie dinner on Dec. 4 and give a free public presentation on Dec. 5 at 10:30 a.m. at Central Library, Fourth Street and Denver Avenue. Dinner tickets are $125. For more information about the award or to purchase tickets for the dinner, call 918-596-7897.