TASSIE CHANGED LIFE OF PULITZER AUTHOR
FOR Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, rafting the Franklin River proved to be a “lifechanging” experience that reshaped her view of the world.
The Sydney-born Ms Brooks, 66, is in the midst of a speaking tour of Australia to promote her recently published sixth novel, Horse, and will be in conversation with Tasmanian writer Heather Rose at the Theatre Royal on Wednesday .
More than a decade before she’d written her first book, Ms Brooks, who today splits her time between Sydney and Massachusetts, was working as a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, a job that once took her into the deep wilderness of Tasmania.
Given the task of covering the debate around the proposal to dam the Franklin, a 25-year-old Ms Brooks embarked on a journey down the river with then Australian Democrats leader Don Chipp.
“I had never been in wilderness in that way – just the magnificence of the river and the experience was extraordinary, personally, apart from the story that I was writing,” she said. “I think (I realised) how we as human beings, we’ve evolved to be part of nature.”
Following a career as a foreign correspondent, Ms Brooks has been widely lauded for her fiction. Her second novel, March, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006.
Ms Brooks’ latest book is inspired by her research into a legendary 19th century racehorse.
She had been writing Horse for three years when her late husband, the best-selling author Tony Horwitz, died suddenly in 2019.
“Apart from the grief is the entire desperately complicated business of the death bureaucracy,” she said. “So there was no way to really focus on a fictional project.”
“But then … somebody gave me some advice: ‘You need to do your work because it’s what will save you’. (Finishing the book) helped me a lot.” Tickets for Ms Brooks’ conversation can be bought from the Theatre Royal website.