Book Talk with Geraldine Brooks

The fourth and final installment in our series features Geraldine Brooks RI ’06, author of Memorial Days: A Memoir (Viking, 2025). A Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, nonfiction writer, and former foreign correspondent, Brooks blends personal narrative and historical reflection in this meditation on grief, war, and memory, written in the wake of the death of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz RI ’06, also a Pulitzer-prize winner. Brooks’s novels include March (Penguin Books, 2006), People of the Book (Penguin Books, 2008), Caleb’s Crossing (Penguin Books, 2012), The Secret Chord (Viking, 2015), and Horse (Viking, 2022), all New York Times bestsellers. While a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she covered conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, and, with Tony Horwitz, won the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award for best coverage of the Gulf War. Brooks graduated from the University of Sydney and reported for the Sydney Morning Herald before receiving an MA from Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

Discussant: Claire Messud, RI '05; New York Times bestselling author whose works include This Strange Eventful History (W.W. Norton, 2024); Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays (W.W. Norton, 2020); The Burning Girl (W.W. Norton, 2017); The Woman Upstairs (Knopf, 2013); The Emperor’s Children (Knopf, 2006); The Hunters (Harcourt, 2001); The Last Life (Harcourt, 1999); When The World Was Steady (Granta Books, 1995)

Harvard Radcliffe Institute gratefully acknowledges the Steiner Dean’s Leadership Fund for Academic Ventures, which is supporting this event.

For information about Harvard Radcliffe Institute and its many public programs, visit https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/.

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