Geraldine Brooks was born on September 14, 1955, in Sydney, Australia. She studied at the University of Sydney and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She became a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, winning an Overseas Press Club Award in 1996 for her coverage of the Gulf War. She also spent the early ‘90s reporting for The New Yorker throughout the area of the former Yugoslavia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Brooks’s experiences as a correspondent in the Middle East provide a foundational context for her work, particularly in Nine Parts of Desire, where her focus is on delineating the intricacies of women’s lives in Islamic societies. Brooks’s approach to storytelling is characterized by a commitment to journalistic investigation combined with a literary narrative style. The book has received acclaim for its insights into Muslim women’s lives while also attracting some criticism for what some regard as a Western-centric bias (See: Background).

Apart from her journalism, Brooks is also a successful novelist of works of historical fiction. Her second novel, March (2005), inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War-era novel Little Women (1868/1869), won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006.