Geraldine Brooks to speak at Guilford for Town Meeting on Books Oct. 7

Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks will speak Wednesday, Oct. 7, at 7 pm at Dana Auditorium at Guilford College for the Town Meeting on Books presented by The Historical Book Club of North Carolina.

The Town Meeting on Books is open to the public with a pre-purchased reservation of $40 per person through October 1 at HBCofNC.org. Proceeds support a nonprofit literary organization.
    
Geraldine is an Australian-American journalist and novelist who received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her novels People of the Book, Caleb’s Crossing, The Secret Chord and Horse were all New York Times bestsellers, and her first novel, Year of Wonders, was an international bestseller.

Her latest book, Memorial Days (2025), is a memoir chronicling her journey through grief after the sudden death of her husband Tony Horwitz in 2019. She is the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire, Foreign Correspondence and The Idea of Home. 
    
A native of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine began her career as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues. Later, she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.

In 1990, she and her husband Tony won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War, and in 1991, the duo received a citation for excellence for their journalism series, “War and Peace.”

In 2016, she was named an officer in the Order of Australia, and in 2025, she was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Recently, she was interviewed by David Rubenstein on the C-SPAN program “America’s Book Club.”
    
Founded in Greensboro in 1947, The Historical Book Club of North Carolina is a vibrant community of women interested in literature who gather to discuss captivating books on a wide range of topics.

Town Meetings have been annually held since 1948. Authors have included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Tom Wicker, Tom Wolfe, Tony Hillerman, Pat Conroy, Jan Karon, Daniel Wallace, John Hart and Nicholas Sparks.

Since 1952, the club has given the annual Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction for the most significant work of fiction by a North Carolina author.