Literary Birthday – 14 September – Geraldine Brooks

Happy Birthday, Geraldine Brooks, born on 14 September 1955.

Geraldine Brooks Quotes

1. For to know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know his mind.
2. It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.
3. A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artefact of the human mind and hand.
4. There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.
5. If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.
6. 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.
7. Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

Geraldine Brooks is an Australian American journalist and author. Her 2005 novel, March, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2006 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. She returned to Harvard as a Visiting Lecturer in 2021. Her novels People of the Book, Caleb’s Crossing, The Secret Chord, and Horse all were New York Times Bestsellers. In 2016, she was named an Officer in the Order of Australia. She also published the memoir, Memorial Days in 2025.

Image: Author’s Website, © Randi Baird

by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar