'It's a scaffolding for the imagination'

 

“The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.” – Geraldine Brooks

 

Born in Australia on Sept. 14, 1955 Brooks started her writing career as a journalist, first trying her hand in creative writing in 2001 with the novel Year of Wonders.  Set in 1666, the multiple-award winning bestseller is the story of a young woman’s battle to save fellow villagers when the bubonic plague suddenly strikes.   Immediately dispelling any “one-hit wonder” talk, she followed it up with March, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

  

March is inspired by her fondness for Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which her mother had given her as a child and leading Brooks to create a fictional chronicle of wartime service for the "absent father" of the March girls.

 

In the process, she also developed a newfound respect for religion.  “You can't write about the past and ignore religion,” she said.   “It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.”

 

Her most recent books are Horse, out in 2022, and the just-released nonfiction work Memorial Days: A Memoir.

 
She encourages all who are interested in history not to fear writing historical fiction. “There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all,” she said.  “And that's where your imagination can go to work.”