Truth and the Novel, author Geraldine Brooks

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth, said Albert Camus. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks spent half her life as a journalist, running after the truth in difficult places where despots and warlords were desperate to obfuscate. Later she turned to fiction, but her novels always hew as closely as possible to historical truth. In the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2025 Dr. S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities, Brooks will discuss her process as a novelist and how it is informed by the toolkit she acquired as a foreign correspondent covering conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans.

A book signing will follow the lecture and Q&A.
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Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist renowned for her deeply immersive, character-driven historical novels. Her fiction debut, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, became an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages. In 2006, Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her second novel, March. Her other bestsellers include People of the Book, Caleb’s Crossing, The Secret Chord, and Horse. In addition to fiction, Brooks has authored acclaimed nonfiction books, including Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, Foreign Correspondence: A Penpal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over, and The Idea of Home. Her latest book, Memorial Days, was published in 2025.