Meet the author - Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks will be in conversation with Alex Sloan on her new book Memorial Days, a heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toward peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse.

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz - just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy - collapsed and died on a Washington, DC street.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, and living in Sydney, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on the US Memorial Day public holiday of 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, Geraldine booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on the island's pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony and mystery of life.

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks AO is an author and journalist. 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. 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,and was shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize 2022 and the BookPeople Adult Fiction Book of the Year 2023. In 2011 she gave the Boyer Lectures, later published as The Idea of Home. Geraldine Brooks divides her time between Sydney and Massachusetts

Alex Sloan AM has been a journalist for over 30 years, including as a long-time broadcaster with the ABC. Alex, who was named Canberra Citizen of the Year in 2017, is deputy chair of The Australia Institute and a director of The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. Alex is a regular conversationalist in the Meet the Author series.

Karen Viggers is a Canberra writer, veterinarian and podcaster. She is the author of four novels, which have been bestsellers in France as well as Australia: The Stranding, The Lightkeeper's Wife, The Grass Castle and The Orchardist's Daughter. She is co-host with Irma Gold of the Secrets From the Green Room podcast.

This event is in association with Harry Hartog Bookshop. Books will be available for purchase on the evening in the Cultural Centre foyer. Pre-event book signings will be available from 5.30pm and again after the event.

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A podcast will be made available after the event.

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