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.

TulsaKids Magazine
November 2009
By Jackie Hill

Learning the art of conversation … listening to others … waiting to have your say … these are the elements of family dinner that make it the most favorite time of day for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks.

"I’m a bit old-fashioned about this but I think everyone should sit down together for dinner," said Brooks, who is coming to Tulsa Dec. 4 and 5 to receive the Tulsa Library Trust’s 2009 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. "Also, as we’re a multigenerational family spanning ages 6 to 90 it is important to hear from each other and not spin out entirely into our own worlds of work, adolescence, et cetera. Plus I love to cook so the food is pretty good most of the time."

The Australian-born author, who lives in Martha’s Vineyard with her husband, mom and two sons, says she leads a typical life.

"My sons leave for school by 7:30 and I go to work in the attic till they get home. Then I do Mom stuff – schlepping them to music or sport, working in the veggie garden, riding herd on homework and making dinner," said Brooks.

Life wasn’t always so typical for Brooks who in the late-1980s through mid-‘90s led an adventurous, dangerous life working as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Dodging bullets, running for cover while helicopter gunships hovered overhead, being arrested and accused as a spy were among the harrowing experiences Brooks encountered while covering conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.

During her career as an award-winning journalist, Brooks penned her first nonfiction book, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, in 1995. She followed it with the memoir Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey From Down Under to All Over, chronicling her childhood in Sydney, Australia, where pen pals from around the world enriched her life and fulfilled her yearning for the exotic.

"Having pen pals connects you to the rest of the world in a wonderful and intimate way," said Brooks, who thinks children nowadays can benefit from the experience. "It made the rather small world of my childhood a much vaster place and helped me to see things through other people’s eyes."

During adolescence, Brooks’ favorite book to read was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

"I think I read The Lord of the Rings every spring for about five years," she said. "I associate it with sitting in the garden in Sydney in late September (which is spring there), munching on the new green peas from my mum’s veggie patch. It is a wonderful story, complicated and engrossing and thoroughly entertaining. At different times it spoke to me in different ways – as a kid I loved the idea that the small ones mattered most in the end; as an older person I was struck by the idea that confronting evil can often have huge costs to what is good – a lesson quite relevant to today’s predicaments."

After her first son was born, Brooks made the decision to hang up her career as a foreign correspondent and try her hand at writing historical fiction. Her first novel, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, hit the stands in 2001 and was an international best-seller. She followed it with the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner March, a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women from the point of view of the girls’ absent father, Mr. March. Her latest novel, People of the Book, was an instant New York Times best-seller and has been translated into more than 20 languages. Catherine Zeta-Jones has acquired the film rights.

When asked about Jones’ plans for filming People of the Book, Brooks said she tries not to think too much about it.

"The book is the book and the film is something else entirely," she said. "The film business is an emotional rollercoaster, with so many moving parts. When you write a book it’s up to you. You just sit down and do it. With movies you have to get a good scriptwriter, you need to entice a luminous star and an esteemed director, and even when you’ve done all that, it still might not happen because the financing falls through. So, one day, I hope to be sitting in the darkened cinema as the credits roll on something based on the novel by Geraldine Brooks. Until then it’s really none of my business. But I would like, if a book of mine ever gets filmed, to play a corpse or something in it."

SIDEBAR

Meet Geraldine Brooks,
Winner of the 2009 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award

Black-tie Dinner
Friday, Dec. 4 * Central Library, Fourth Street and Denver Avenue
Tickets: $125
Call 918-596-7897 to purchase tickets.

Free Public Presentation
Saturday, Dec. 5 * 10:30 a.m. * Central Library

Call 918-596-7977 or visit www.tulsalibrary.org for more information.