Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks speaks at Harvard’s Houghton Library
Giving voice to the unheard is “very close to the bone for me,” said Geraldine Brooks during a talk sponsored by the Harvard Review. The Australia-born author, whose 2006 novel “March” won a Pulitzer Prize, finds the spark for that narrative impulse in her family history. Brooks, who discussed her writing life with visiting Fulbright Fellow Anne Pender at Houghton Library on Tuesday, recalled how her not-too-distant Irish relatives arrived in Australia unable to write home “about their life in this new place that was so different from that moist green land they left. … I think that is what inspired me to say, ‘Who else’s stories are inaccessible to us?’” As a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in the 1980s and 1990s, Brooks covered conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. Often, the inaccessible stories belonged to women. “They were so happy to engage with somebody who wanted...