Geraldine Brooks remembered the day her father took her to see the newspapers. This was in her native Australia. She was little, maybe 8. He was a proofreader at the paper, an American who settled in Down Under after a singing career, and he took her to the pressroom floor, where the heavy linotype machines whirred and clanged and the noise was unbelievable. “The foreman hit the button for the afternoon edition and this paper’s just spinning across the room and the newspapers start landing on the conveyor belt and Dad reached out and got one and handed it to me and it was … hot off the press,” she laughed. “I looked down on those big black headlines and I thought, ‘I am the first one that knows what’s going on in this city right now.’ And I just wanted that.” Reader, she got it. Some six decades, 10 books and many an international byline later, she recounted this origin story to a delighted crowd in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium on a recent night. Brooks, the 2025 recipient of the Library’s Prize for American Fiction, has been a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal; then a mom who…
Creative
Geraldine Brooks – on life, love and loss – at the Library
Source: Library of Congress Blogs — US Government, Public Domain