Geraldine Brooks: Memorial Days

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in Sydney's western suburbs. She worked for the Sydney Morning Herald and in 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton scholarship to the journalism master's program at Columbia University. Later she worked for the Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. In 2006 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel March. Her novels Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book and The Secret Chord were New York Times bestsellers, and Year of Wonders was an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages. She is also the author of the acclaimed non-fiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her novel Horse was the winner of the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award and Fiction Indie Book Award for 2023, the 88th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for 2023, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize 2022 and the BookPeople Adult Fiction Book of the Year 2023. In 2011 she presented Australia's prestigious Boyer Lectures, later published as The Idea of Home. In 2016 she was appointed Officer in the Order of Australia for her services to literature. Geraldine Brooks divides her time between Sydney and Massachusetts and has two sons.

Susan Johnson is the author of 14 books, published in Australia, the US, England and in European translation. Nine are novels, including the most recent, From Where I Fell (2022), shortlisted for the Voss Literary Prize. The others are collections she edited, as well as two memoirs, A Better Woman (1999), on motherhood, illness and writing, and the critically acclaimed Aphrodite’s Breath: A Mother, A Daughter and a Greek Island (2023), about living on Kythera. Susan Johnson’s books have been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Prize, the Christina Stead Award, the National Biography Award, the Nita B Kibble Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, among others. She has been awarded two residencies at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, and her manuscripts and papers are collected by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.