'It's the scaffold beneath the structure'

“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 Sydney, Australia on this date in 1955, Brooks –  now a citizen of both Australia and the United States – started her career as an award-winning journalist, primarily writing for the Wall Street Journal.  Her first novel, Year of Wonders, set in a 1666 village stricken by the bubonic plague, was a massive international bestseller and started her along a creative writing path. 

 

Her second novel, March – imagining the Civil War service of the “absent” father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – won her the Pulitizer Prize for Fiction.   She has now written 6 novels and 4 nonfiction books, her most recent being 2025’s Memorial Days: A Memoir. 

  

“Writing is like bricklaying,” Brooks said.  “You put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.”