Her secret chord

Award-winning Australian author Geraldine Brooks on how journalism influenced her fiction writing

“I do not think I would be able to write the novels that I do, if I hadn’t spent the first 15 years of my career as a journalist,” says Geraldine Brooks, when asked how journalism relates to fiction in her works. She was in conversation with Gauri Viswanathan, a writer and professor of literature at Columbia University.

“Journalism was what I always intended to do. From the time I was eight, I was convinced that I wanted to be a writer for the newspaper in Sydney, my home town,” says the Pulitzer-winning author, who has a Master’s degree from Columbia University. Brooks’ experience as a foreign correspondent, reporting human interest stories from conflict-ridden zones in West Asia and the Balkans, has strongly shaped her fiction as well. Her stories are anchored in textual archives and political history, which makes her writing, as Viswanathan described, “rich and textured”. Her engagement with war and its scars make up March , which won her the Pulitzer for fiction. Set in the context of the American Civil War, it retells Louisa May Alcott’s best-known work, Little Women , from the perspective of the father of the four sisters.

“As a foreign correspondent, I mostly specialised in travelling to places at times of crisis. And, being with people at the most difficult time of their lives and seeing how they changed, has emboldened me in writing my fiction,” said Brooks, whose latest novel,

The Secret Chord , traces the life of King David. As a writer, she is drawn to studying that period, when things come apart — be it the civil war or the collapse of Yugoslavia into ethnic animosity.

“We build these magnificent pluralistic, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies. And, that’s when we advance science, art and literature. But, someone stands up and demonises the other, and accuses them of all kinds of crimes. And, it’s happening over and over again.”

The most recent example is the case of the U.S. elections, she added. More than ever before, we need people who stand up against these “currents” in society, even though it is life-threatening business, she reminded. “In India, you have many incredible examples of leadership, who found ways to stand up against oppression. May we continue to have those brave souls who resist and refute, and use whatever weapons they have against this.”