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Geraldine Brooks to Visit the National Library

Geraldine Brooks - Photo: Randi Baird.

Geraldine Brooks
Photo by Randi Baird

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks will be visiting the National Library of Australia in October. While she is here, she will give two major lectures: the inaugural Ray Mathew Lecture and the Kenneth Binns Lecture, the keynote address at the Library's conference ‘The Flight of the Mind: Writing and the Creative Imagination’.

Brooks was born and raised in Sydney’s inner western suburbs. She attended the University of Sydney before embarking on a career in journalism, which eventually lead her to The Wall Street Journal. For a decade, she covered conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. In an interview with Andrew Denton in 2005, Brooks credited the Nigerian Secret Police for her decision to give up her position as a foreign correspondent. After spending three nights in a Nigerian prison, she decided it was time to go home. Home, by this time, was the United States, where her husband and fellow foreign correspondent Tony Horwitz was waiting for her.

‘Not long after my son was born, I sat down to try to write my first novel,’ Brooks writes in her 2001 essay The Writing Life. ‘It was to have been set in Tasmania, amid the wild temperate rain forests of Australia’s southernmost state. Instead, I found myself writing about Derbyshire.’

That book was Year of Wonders. Published in 2001, the historical novel set in ‘Plague Village’ became an international bestseller. March, her evocation of the American Civil War, experienced by the father of Louisa May Alcott’s fictional family of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006. Her most recent novel, People of the Book (2008), traces the journey of a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript from convivencia Spain to the ruins of Sarajevo, from the Silver Age of Venice to the sunburned rock faces of northern Australia. The Library holds copies of all of Brook’s published fiction and non-fiction, including copies of foreign editions in languages such as Urdu, Danish, Arabic and Chinese.

Brooks still lives in the United States and makes regular visits to Australia to ‘water her roots’. The Library is delighted that she has agreed to deliver the inaugural Ray Mathew Lecture. The free public lecture, to be held at 6pm on Thursday 22 October 2009, is supported by the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust. It is the Library’s intention that the lecture will be given annually by an Australian living abroad. It is named in honour of the Australian poet and playwright, Ray Mathew, who left Australia in the late 1960s, never to return. Mathew spent most of the remainder of his life—he died in 2002—living in the New York apartment of his patrons, Eva and Paul Kollsman. The Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust is a generous bequest, made to the Library by Eva Kollsman, to support and promote the work of contemporary Australian writers. Brooks’ lecture will, fittingly, be ‘The Opportunity of Distance’.

Brooks will also give a second lecture while in Canberra. On Saturday 24 October, she will give the Kenneth Binns Lecture, the keynote address at the major National Library conference, The Flight of the Mind: Writing and the Creative Imagination. In her lecture ‘Hearing Voices and Other Close Encounters with the Dead’, Brooks will explore how a historical novelist captures the voices of the past, especially those who have been marginalised by history. In discussing her journey ‘in search of the lost’, Brooks will set the scene for two days of discussion about the journey from inspiration to publication. Twenty of Australia’s best writers, including Alex Miller, Rodney Hall, Andrea Goldsmith, Judy Horacek and Peter Goldsworthy, will join Brooks to explore the joys and challenges of the creative process.

It is fitting that Brooks should be making this visit to Canberra and to the National Library, for she has dedicated People of the Book to ‘the librarians’. In a recent interview with Ramona Koval, she was, she said, ‘thinking about the librarians of Sarajevo’, who formed a human chain to evacuate books while the National Library of Bosnia was being bombed:

But, I was also thinking about librarians in the US recently who were the only ones who had the guts to stand up to George Bush’s Patriot Act by refusing to hand over lending records to show what books people had been borrowing. So I think librarians as a group are underrated for their courage.’

Kathryn Favelle
Manager, Event Development

Geraldine Brooks will give the inaugural Ray Mathew Lecture at 6pm, Thursday 22 October 2009. The lecture is supported by the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust. The lecture is free, bookings essential on 6262 1271 or email bookings@nla.gov.au.

‘The Flight of the Mind: Writing and the Creative Imagination’ is on Saturday and Sunday, 24 and 25 October 2009. The conference is supported by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL)’s Cultural Fund, the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust, and Alison Sanchez. Tickets are available.

More information about Brooks and her work: