3 December 2020 Geraldine Brooks I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
3 December 2020 Geraldine Brooks September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.
3 December 2020 Geraldine Brooks 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, and that’s where imagination can work.
3 December 2020 Geraldine Brooks The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.
3 December 2020 Geraldine Brooks Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.
3 December 2020 Geraldine Brooks My mother’s family were full-on Irish Catholics – faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women’s rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.
3 December 2020 Geraldine Brooks 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.
3 December 2020 Geraldine Brooks You can’t write about the past and ignore religion. 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.
3 December 2020 Geraldine Brooks 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.
