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Geraldine Brooks credits an unlikely duo--flatulent sheep and the Nigerian secret police--for her career as a writer of historical fiction.  Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, she longed to be a newspaper reporter.  From New Zealand, in 1987, she filed what she considers her most notable dispatch, on the opportunity to study global warming afforded by the country's huge, methane-producing, sheep population.   The so-called "farting sheep"  story led to her appointment as Middle East bureau chief for the Journal, where she spent six years covering regional conflicts, including the first Gulf War, and wrote her first book of non-fiction, Nine Parts of Desire, published in 1994. Later, as the Journal's UN Correspondent, she covered conflicts in Bosnia and Somalia and African development issues.  In Nigeria to report on Shell Oil's collusion with the Abacha military dictatorship, she was arrested, accused of being a spy, and thrown in jail.  It was at this point that she began to consider a midlife career change.

In 1995 she wrote a memoir, Foreign Correspondence, which chronicles a childhood enriched by penpals from around the world, and her adult quest to find them. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, published in 2001, was inspired by the true story of Eyam, Derbyshire, where villagers voluntarily quarantined themselves when plague struck in 1665. He second novel, March, a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women from the point of view of Mr. March, the absent father, won the Pulitzer prize for Fiction in 2006.  Her most recent novel, People of the Book, has been translated into more than 20 languages and was an instant New York Times bestseller.

She lives on Martha's Vineyard with her husband Tony Horwitz, their sons, Nathaniel  and Bizuayehu, and three dogs.