Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-born author and journalist who grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney. She attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. Brooks worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues. In 1982, she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. Later, she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2006 for her novel March.