‘You may find me chained to a tree’: Geraldine Brooks reveals her next act

April 26, 2026 — 5:00am

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Geraldine Brooks is a former Herald journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel March.

Fitz: Geraldine, congratulations. In this week of the Herald’s 195th anniversary, you have been identified by our editor-in-chief as our most distinguished literary alumna and – short of someone getting the Nobel Prize for Literature – are likely to remain so for some time. What I most love, however, and I’ve been telling people the story for years, is that you trace your literary beginnings to the Herald sports department in the late ’70s, where you were a junior racing writer!

GB: [Laughing.] That’s overstating it. I was merely a humble clerk to the actual writers. I’d graduated from Bethlehem Ladies’ College at Ashfield in the mid-’70s, and was desperate to be a journalist from the age of eight. So I’d gone to Sydney Uni where I did a double major in the subjects I thought might be useful – government and fine arts. I pestered the Herald so much to give me a cadetship that I drove the poor guy who was in charge of recruiting completely spare. And so when I arrived there – the full bottle on the uses of tempera in quattrocento Italian wall painting and classical political theory from Plato to Hobbes – of course I was sent to the Herald sports department, to assist the racing writers.

Fitz: Of course! Rrrrracing now at Randwick! Did you actually get to report on who won the fifth race on a heavy track?

GB: I didn’t get to write anything. I would have loved to have written Damon Runyon-esque character profiles of people at the track and whatnot, but it wasn’t to be. All I did was take down details for the actual racing writers. I had to note down the position of every horse at every turn, the odds they started at, what they went out to, and then the results, of course. Every race in Sydney, including the trots and the dogs.

Fitz: Being a racing writer is of course, a fine thing. Some of my best friends … etc. But did you have some sense while doing it, “I’m destined for bigger things”?

GB: I have to tell you, I could not get out of that assignment fast enough. It was the longest four months of my life. But finally I was plucked from the sports department and sent over to learn at the knee of Lenore Nicklin, who was the leading feature writer in Australia. And it couldn’t have been a better place to be. I got to write features, which was wonderful.

Fitz: The Herald must have realised pretty early, “Jesus wept, she can write”?

GB: I don’t remember anything like that. You just did your story and got on with the next one. But the ones that stuck with me, of course, were the most emotional stories, like going down to Appin to cover the mine disaster. That was my first experience of having to do a “death-knock” on somebody who’s just lost the love of their life in a terrible catastrophe. And I remember another one about a young firefighter who was tragically killed, trying to save lives and the property of other people.

Fitz: So how did we at the Herald let you slip through our fingers?

GB: I was lucky enough to get the scholarship that Shirley Shackleton had established in memory of her husband Greg, who was killed by the Indonesian army in East Timor, as part of the Balibo Five in 1975. Greg had always wanted to do the journalism master’s degree at New York’s Columbia University. And so with her great tenacity and persuasiveness, Shirley started the Australian News Correspondents Memorial Scholarship, and I was the first Greg Shackleton Scholar. And while there I met two people who changed my trajectory. One of them was the recruiter for The Wall Street Journal, and the other one was my fellow student and writer Tony Horwitz. Reader, I married him – and so a great life of romance began.

Fitz: I love the story of you getting the gig at the Journal.

GB: My journalism professor at Columbia said: “When you go to the interview, they will ask you the Cleveland question. And don’t worry, they ask everybody this question: ‘Would you take this job if it meant relocating to Cleveland?’ Don’t worry, just say yes, because it’s a test about your seriousness of commitment to the paper.”

I covered the Middle East when Saddam was America’s friend. The bloodletting hasn’t stopped

Geraldine BrooksAuthor and journalist

Author and journalist

So they asked that very question, I answered “yes” and they sent me there! So that was my first foreign correspondent assignment: Cleveland, Ohio!

Fitz: And Tony Horwitz in all this?

GB: Well, when Tony realised that he was in love with me, instead of taking the job that he had lined up on the West Coast, he came back, bless his heart, and found the closest journalism job he could, which was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is still not that close.

Fitz: I sayeth: “Greater love has no man than he will to move to the very heart of Bible Belt US to be closer to his missus!” In short order though, you’re moving around the world, interviewing despots, dictators and demons, filing from everywhere. What was the scariest journalistic situation you found yourself in?

GB: I think the best and worst experience of my journalistic career was the same experience, which was covering the Kurdish uprising after the first Gulf War. I managed to get myself into Iraq on a raft across the Tigris River with the Kurdish guerrillas who were seizing their freedom from Saddam Hussein. I got to visit the prisons that they’d liberated and see the ghastly torture apparatus that the regime had used on the Kurds, and I was there when they excavated the mass grave at Halabja, where Saddam had used poison gas on his own people.

And when George Bush snr made the mistake of letting Saddam have his helicopter gunships back, he immediately sent them north to crush that uprising. And I ended up having to flee over the mountains into Turkey with thousands of terrified Kurds.

Fitz: On occasion, when young writers say to me, “I want to be a writer, what should I do?” My answer is, “Get depth and width of experience, travel, move around the world and have extraordinary adventures.” A lot of mine were rugby related, and great, but you leave me for dead. Was it those experiences that turned you into this formidable writer of novels?

GB: All I know is, I could never write the novels if I hadn’t had those experiences of witnessing people in the moment of greatest crisis in their lives. It’s a heavy, heavy responsibility, bearing witness as a journalist. But I think the only way you can honour those people’s sacrifice is to try and convey what it means to be uprooted from your house, to be imprisoned for your beliefs, all the terrible consequences of the foreign policies that get cooked up in the White House. You know, they have real impact on ordinary people’s lives.

Fitz: Your first book, Nine Parts of Desire, in 1994, was about Muslim women in the Middle East.

GB: Yes, that was purely a journalist’s account of my experiences because I like to report from the bottom up, not the top down, but there isn’t a lot of leeway for a woman in public spaces in a lot of the countries I was covering. It’s not like in, say, Darwin, where you can walk into the pub and you can immediately get a story. There’s a shortage of pubs in the Muslim Middle East, and in the coffee shop equivalent one of two things happens: Either everybody starts hitting on you because of the widespread assumption that Western women are loose, or they all are terrified because you’re a foreign reporter, and you’ll get them into trouble.

The fact that those doors were closed made me realise there was a window that was open just for me, because none of the male reporters were bothering, and that was to cover the women of the region.

Fitz: Great thinking, 99.

GB: And through the women of the region, I got the most extraordinary access. Like in Iran, I met Ayatollah Khomeini’s wife and daughter, and they took me home to the Khomeini family home, which was not something any male reporter was ever going to see. In Lebanon, I was invited to the Beqqa Valley by the wives of the leaders of Hezbollah.

Fitz: Wow. And when making your visa application for such places, and you had to tick what religion you were, would you write “Jewish”, or not?

GB: I would. And I found it was more of an asset than a liability, because if they knew you were Jewish, they realised that you had some skin in the game, and they would talk to you on a more serious level.

Fitz: So you keep writing, and soon turn to historical fiction novels. Why?

GB: Mark Twain said “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” So I’m looking for these implausible truths. Some of the greatest stories, you can’t write as non-fiction – Fitz: [Interrupting] “Watch me!” – because there just isn’t anything substantial enough on the historical record to go on … So those are the places where imaginative empathy works on stories you can find and say, “Well, maybe it happened like this …”

Fitz: And when in 2004, you were doing your biggest novel, March, for example, set during the American Civil War, were you sitting at the desk at 8am and writing for 10 hours straight, or doing it between gigs as a journalist?

GB: I worked according to the school bus. When it took my sons, I started writing. When it brought them back, I stopped.

Fitz: Until one day the phone rang…

GB: The phone rang, and it was one of my old editors from The Wall Street Journal, and he said, “This is fantastic! This is so great!” And I didn’t know what he was talking about. And he said, “You’ve got the Pulitzer”! And I said, “Don’t be foolish, I haven’t done any reporting,” and I hung up on him. Because in my head, you got the Pulitzer for reporting, like my husband Tony had done a decade earlier.

Fitz: And then you realise, you’ve actually won the Pulitzer Prize for your novel (March).

GB: Yes, or the “Pulitzer Surprise”, as my 10-year-old called it at the time. And they give you a lovely little lead-glass tchotchke with Joseph Pulitzer’s head engraved in it.

Fitz: And did you hold it up and say, “I’d like to dedicate this to The Sydney Morning Herald sports and their racing scribes, without whom I would have been nothing”?

GB: [Laughing.] No, they’re wise enough to not let you say anything, because winners, particularly journalists, can rabbit on for a long time!

Fitz: Your most moving book has been Memorial Days, which documents the grief at the loss of your husband in such tragically sudden circumstances. Did that one just pour out of you?

GB: That one was so different because I wrote it out of sheer necessity. I realised that because of the suddenness of his death and the absolute brutality of the American medical and legal system, I hadn’t had the opportunity to really grieve in the way that I needed to. And I figured out, if I was going to get right in the head, I needed to deal with what had happened.

GB: The phone rang at our home in Martha’s Vineyard on May 27, 2019. It was a doctor from a hospital in Washington, DC.

“Is this the home of Tony Horwitz?”

“Who am I speaking to?”

And then she went rambling on about how he collapsed in the street. And I thought she was going to tell me that he’d had a procedure or something, and she just said, “And we couldn’t revive him,” and I didn’t understand. I just couldn’t get it through my head what she was trying to tell me, and she couldn’t get me off the phone fast enough.

It was just brutal. It was terrible. Tony was a six-day-a-week gym rat. He was still wearing exactly the same size clothing as when I met him in graduate school. He didn’t have a gram of excess body fat. He was very careful about his diet, and he was on a book tour, and he had crisscrossed the country and had big audiences and everything was just great. And he just fell down in the street, dead, with a massive heart attack.

Three years after her husband died, Geraldine Brooks finally confronted her grief

Fitz: Was it his death that brought you home to Australia?

GB: Yes, basically. I’d been trying to get him here off and on over the years, and he’d come for a year or so, but that was it. He was a more stubborn bastard than I was, and he had, so far, won that battle about where we lived. Now I am beginning to recentre my life here.

Fitz: For argument’s sake, let’s say the first act of your adult life was the Herald. Second act is foreign correspondent. Third act is brilliant author. What have you got planned for your fourth act?

GB: Like you, I love writing books, and I’ll probably keep doing that for as long as I can get away with it. But I do feel like it’s time to do something for the forests. And if they keep logging in Tasmania’s extraordinary Tarkine wilderness, you may find me chained to a tree.

Fitz: Bravo. Thank you. And allow me to say on behalf of the Herald, and more particularly the sports department, we’re proud of you. One of ours made good in the big city!

GB: Thank you. See you in Sorrento.

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