>>John Williams: What a thrill for me to be here with the great Geraldine Brooks.

Thank you all for being here early in the morning.

This is early for me and Geraldine.

We've had our coffee.

can I just say a quick show of hands?

Because the book's been out for a bit, and I know it's very popular.

How many people have read the book in here?

Oh, good.

Okay, that's great.

It's a beautiful book.

It's a very moving book about your incredible husband, Tony, whose work I also loved and admired.

We are going to kind of skirt the, there are a lot of difficult things in the book that aren't just emotional, but that are about, as you put it at one point, the cruel bureaucracy of death in this country and things like that.

But it's a Saturday morning.

A lot of people have already read about it, heard you speak about it.

And so I think we're going to try to roam a little further afield.

But I want to start by just asking you to say something about Tony.

Let us know what he was like.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a great novelist bring their personality to life on the page, but how would you introduce him to people?

>> Geraldine Brooks: Well, I could tell you that it wasn't love at first sight.

[laughter] We met the first week at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and I had come from Sydney.

I'd been working on my hometown newspaper and been lucky enough to get a scholarship for the graduate program, and I thought, this is great.

I get to be in a great city and hone my craft for a year, and then I'll go back to Australia and get on with my real life.

Tony was coming from a very different place.

He had been working as a labor organizer with poor black woodcutters in Mississippi, and trying to get fair pay for their incredibly hard work as pulpwood haulers.

And he had realized in the course of that year, being chased and shot at and getting an ulcer, that this was a really slow way to affect social change.

And it occurred to him journalism might be quicker.

So he applied to the journalism school and we met the first week of class on a fellow students balcony on the Upper West Side, and he was telling a pretty funny story about he'd moved in with his brother in Alphabet City, which in the early 80s was a very rough neighborhood.

And he'd learned that when he left his car, he had to take the battery with him, otherwise it would be stolen and he'd have to buy it back from the local parts dealer every morning.

So it had taken him about three goes to realize that was how it was going to have to be.

I thought it was cute.

[laughter] And the next day was the big assembly in the grandiosely titled World Room of Columbia University, and the even more grandiose than Dean of the school, Oz Elliott, gave us a very rousing speech.

Anyway, I saw the cute, tousled blonde on the other side of the hall and I waved to him and he didn't wave back.

And I thought, well, you and the horse you rode in on.

[laughter] and then we basically ignored each other for the next nine months, and, but then we found each other in a class on business reporting, which we'd both taken on a whim, thinking if we want our writing to smash capitalism, we'd better learn about capitalism.

And I was really struck by his idealism in that class.

And I've got to say, after spring break, when he and his brother went back to Mississippi to make a film for PBS on the pulpwood haulers, I was also struck by his beautifully sculpted and tanned forearms.

[laughter] And as we got to know each other in that class, he finally confided that the reason he hadn't waved back to me in the World Room that day, so many months earlier, was because he'd been out carousing with his brother the night before, and he dropped his glasses down the toilet at Danceteria and he couldn't even see me.

[laughter] >> John Williams: An auspicious beginning, >> Geraldine Brooks: An auspicious beginning but we managed to make up for lost time.

>> John Williams: Right under the wire, because it was a one year program.

So at the end of the year, you figured... >> Geraldine Brooks: Not convenient because I'd already accepted a job with the Wall Street Journal in Cleveland, Ohio, which was going to be my first foreign assignment.

[laughter] >> John Williams: Where was he going right after?

>> Geraldine Brooks: He was going to the West Coast.

He had an internship out in California, and it didn't look promising, but he was driving west and he stopped in Cleveland on the way west.

And we had a great weekend.

And luckily for me, the radio in his car broke just as he was leaving the Cleveland city limits.

So he had that long drive to think about what a great time he'd just had.

[laughter] >> John Williams: And it didn't take long.

You were married within a year and a half.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Yeah, yeah.

>> John Williams: He was, very daring as a foreign correspondent.

>> Geraldine Brooks: He was nuts.

>> John Williams: Nuts is another way of putting it.

>> Geraldine Brooks: He was absolutely -- There was nothing-- I mean, there was nothing he wouldn't do.

And it wasn't that he was without fear.

It was just that he just went straight through the fear to do the most ridiculous things.

>> John Williams: But you were a war journalist with him in these zones.

And I'm wondering what the respective levels of daring were when you met and how you influenced each other, the balance of risk and caution.

What was the relationship between you, like in terms of risk?

>> Geraldine Brooks: Well, just to back up a bit, I don't think either of us, a lot of people go into journalism thinking, I'm going to be a war correspondent.

That's their ambition.

That was not--I thought I might a food reviewer or something, you know?

No, I wanted to write about environmental issues, but I didn't imagine that it would be anything like the career that we had.

And it's just one of those examples of way leads onto way.

And if you're intrigued by the world and you get an opportunity, a phone call late at night-- from the phone-- late at night in Sydney, from the foreign editor of the Wall Street Journal saying, would you like to be the Middle East correspondent?

The only real answer is hell yeah.

And then poor old Tony had to give up his perfectly wonderful job and come to Cairo with no guarantees of anything.

And he became a stringer, which I think drove him to do the crazy stuff that he did and get incredible stories.

Level of risk: so I don't think anyone knows how they're going to be in those situations.

But I think Winston Churchill put it well that there's nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.

[laughter] And there was something crazy and life affirming in being in these situations where everything is at risk and you make it through and you value life in this incredibly enhanced way, and you value little things like dry socks and a towel that hasn't previously been used by 15 Peshmerga.

You get out of that war zone and you get back to the nice hotel where they bring you food on a tray, and you think this life is the sweetest thing in the world, and you have to then learn to hold on to that after you stop doing the things that make you value it so much.

>> John Williams: I guess the short answer to that question then, and I say this with so much respect, is that you were both nuts.

You were both you were both welcoming the shots as long as the end result was okay.

It was thrilling.

>> Geraldine Brooks: We were very lucky to get out of it with all our extremities.

You know, when you put on a bulletproof vest, you realize all the bits of yourself you really like that are not covered by it.

[laughter] And also, you can't often... you can't in good conscience wear one because you're asking people to invite you into their lives and they don't have one, so yeah.

>> John Williams: You read Tony's journals, not in writing this book, I guess, just to read them.

And you ended up writing about that.

I'm curious if you had any trepidation about that.

Not for any privacy reasons, but just I would feel very, almost scared to read about someone I think I know very intimately and what I might find in their private thoughts?

>> Geraldine Brooks: I didn't expect to be as surprised as I was.

But yeah, I knew that these were very private thoughts and I had only violated that privacy once early in our courtship, and it led to a huge blow up because you realize that, you know it's another person and they're seeing things differently to you.

And after that, I never looked at them.

But after he died, I decided that I was desperate for his voice and his company and that I would read them.

And yeah, there were a lot of surprising things in there, and fortunately, nothing alarming about our marriage.

But this was where he went with his, you know, dark night of the soul stuff.

There's not a lot of the-- he didn't write about the fun things.

He didn't need to.

He went there when he was feeling insecure and troubled.

And so it wasn't hilarious reading by any means.

I found much more of that in his letters.

That's where he put all the humor.

>> John Williams: So that tone was pretty consistent in the journals.

It wasn't a roller coaster.

It was more like, this is where I go, and I kind of have this.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Yeah, there's some very amusing things and particularly the shenanigans he was up to before he met me, which were quite surprising.

>> John Williams: Danceteria was just the start of it.

>> John Williams: How far back did the journals go?

>> Geraldine Brooks: Oh, they went back to, I think, his time as an undergraduate at Brown, yeah.

And then he stopped writing once he left journalism and turned to books.

And I think he didn't have many dark nights of the soul because he really found what he loved and what loved him once he settled in as a book writer.

So it was a particular period in his life.

But I tell you, I'm sitting all alone in a shack on an island off the coast of Tasmania, and I'm reading the journal that he wrote while I was off on assignment somewhere and we were living in Cairo.

And he writes, “I've come to the conclusion that I'll never amount to anything in journalism.” And I just burst out laughing because a year after that, he was a star reporter covering conflicts for the Wall Street Journal in Europe.

And then he was getting the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

So it's amazing how much you don't know about what's coming your way.

>> John Williams: I should say, for those who haven't read the book that the book toggles between two places very kind of neatly chapter by chapter.

First, you're in 2019, around Memorial Day weekend when Tony passed away, and then you're four years later, you've gone to Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania, very small, remote island, and you're in a shack.

I think you say 30 minutes from the nearest store.

So the island's remote to begin with.

And then within the island, you're very remote.

You say at one point that he would have found something mocking to say about your going to the island and making this morning ritual and being kind of serious about it.

And I wonder if you had that kind of conversation with him in your head much while you were there.

Like, oh, I know, but shut up.

Let me do what I need to do.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Yeah, yeah.

So the reason for doing it was his death was I can't tell you how unexpected it was.

This guy was, as far as we knew, the picture of health.

And went to the gym six days a week and still fit into the same size clothes as the day I met him.

>> John Williams: He looked like he was 30.

>> Geraldine Brooks: He really and he acted that way, too.

And then, he dropped dead on the border between here in Chevy Chase, and it really literally dropped dead after having brunch.

He was on book tour, and I was not in any way prepared for this.

And then I went into this the whole bureaucracy of death that crushes you and doesn't give you time and space to do the work of grieving and getting yourself into any kind of emotional shape.

And then I went into a kind of act of acting woman being normal, because that was what was expected.

And also, you want to protect your kids.

And it had been three years and I was just exhausted.

And I thought, this has got to stop and I have to stop it.

And the only way I could think of to stop it was to take a complete break from absolutely everything.

And I had a kind of emotional tie to this island, Flinders Island, and I just decided I would go there and be alone and do the work of grieving for as long as it took, until I could stop pretending to be normal and actually feel really normal again.

>> John Williams: Was it open ended when you went?

You didn't know when you'd come back.

You just thought, “Im going to go see what happens.” >> Geraldine Brooks: Yeah.

I had 40 days in mind for planning purposes, because that seemed like a number that people have used when they've gone and retreated from things.

>> John Williams: You mentioned earlier that you expected to go to Colombia and then go return to Australia and continue on with your normal life or whatever normal life was going to be.

And you use this great phrase in the book, you say that you went to Flinders not only to grieve, but to "interrogate" the cost of my compromise and figure out maybe what you had left by not going back to Australia.

How did at the end, sort of separate from the ideas of grief and Tony, how did you feel about that by the time you were done with your retreat?

Did you come to peace with that as well?

>> Geraldine Brooks: Not really.

You know, so I decided to deal with that by kind of toggling between here and there for as long as I can get away with it.

And it's not a very carbon friendly lifestyle, but I do spend about five months of the year in my hometown in Sydney now, and reconnecting with my tiny little family and my oldest friends.

And that life.

>> John Williams: That sounds lovely.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Yeah, very lucky to be able to do it.

>> John Williams: Is that something that you decided would probably be smart while you were on this retreat?

You kind of felt that I should balance my life that way.

>> Geraldine Brooks: I don't think I was thinking about it then.

It's kind of just fallen into place now that my sons are moving into their own adult lives and not so dependent on me, yeah.

>> John Williams: Another way of getting at Tony and both his personality and his work in one of his best books is you talk in the book about being especially conscious about wishing Tony were still alive on January 6th, 2021.

Can you tell us why?

>> Geraldine Brooks: Well, Tony had been writing about the divisions in this country for a long time.

He was basically a historian at heart.

He had studied history at Brown and could have gone into the academic field very easily if his social conscience hadn't driven him into journalism.

But he wanted to understand why people thought the way they did, and he would run towards the person that most of us would back away from.

And his book “Confederates in the Attic,” published in the 90s, really foresaw so much of what's happened in terms of the schism in this society.

And I have to say, when I saw that mob, violating the capital and breaking their way through the windows, I thought Tony's probably had a beer with 30% of those guys, because that was his life's work was trying to understand why people had that worldview and what it meant, how it connected to our unresolved history.

>> John Williams: Yeah, that book's been a classic since it was published, and it's certainly just as vital today as it's ever been.

>> Geraldine Brooks: And the book that he just finished writing and was on tour for, “Spying on the South,” was revisiting exactly these divisions, and it was no longer a north south old Confederacy -Yankee division.

He saw that it was an economic one.

He was on a coal barge.

This is-- “Spying on the South” follows a journey that Frederick Law Olmsted took as a young reporter for the New York Times before he became a landscape architect, and he was sent south right before the Civil War to ask the question, “why is our nation so divided?” And Tony retraced that journey asking the same question.

And he's on a coal barge in West Virginia working alongside these guys, and you realize that the schism is now coastal, middle of the country, economic haves and have nots.

And he had really interrogated how this fracture was occurring.

>> John Williams: Yeah.

Both those books are great.

And the rest of his books are great, too.

I hope that a lot of people probably are familiar with his work, but those who aren't, I think will find it through this book, which is another great part of this book being in existence.

>> Geraldine Brooks: The beauty of the way Tony wrote, I think the only book that doesn't have a lot of laughs in it is his book about John Brown, “Midnight Rising,” that is like the only one that he wrote as pure history.

The rest of them have a lot of his-- He was still doing crazy, antic things even as he turned 60.

>> John Williams: You write at one point in the book that he believed that death was the end.

I believe that too.

And I wonder if you still believe that?

I've been thinking for 48 hours about how to phrase this, because it's kind of complicated, but did you learn anything through this process about death in general and your feelings about it, rather than the grief for Tony in particular?

>> Geraldine Brooks: We had been very lucky in our family.

Everybody who had died had done so after really rich long lives and not at all unexpectedly.

Usually it had come, in the case of both my parents, as a relief from the illnesses they suffered.

Also, for Tony's parents we hadn't had a death out of order in this way.

And just the disturbance it creates in the fields and the insecurity, I haven't become a fearful person, but I'm much more aware of fragility of life.

You know, I think about it a lot more than I used to.

>> John Williams: Your life as a novelist-- In the book you are-- you talk a few times about the fact that you were in the process of writing “Horse,” which I'm sure many people in this room have read as well, was a big bestseller.

And in this area especially, it was at the top of the Post bestseller list for-- it felt like it's probably still there.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Bless your hearts all of you.

[laughs] >> John Williams: But you write in the book about really struggling with it while Tony was alive, struggling to write it.

>> Geraldine Brooks: It was a tough one because it went in so many different directions.

And then it was also a little fraught, because it was right in the middle of the discussion about appropriation and who has the right to tell what stories.

And I thought, I'm walking into a threshing machine here as a white woman trying to describe the lives of black men.

And who am I to do that?

And I had a big wobble about whether I should even do it.

And Tony just held my feet to the fire and said, have the courage of your convictions and do the work.

Just research the hell out of this and talk to people until you feel you know you can write this authentically and then take whatever comes your way.

>> John Williams: I mean, you write in the book about having jettisoned another project about a historical woman because you couldn't get inside her head.

I know that you pride yourself on if you're writing it, it's because you really feel-- >> Geraldine Brooks: You have to understand.

In the case of that book I never wrote, it was because you have to understand the story that people tell themselves about why they do what they do.

Everybody has that story.

I don't think even Donald Trump gets up in the morning and looks in the mirror and says, I'm going to immiserate a whole bunch of people today.

I think he's telling himself a different story.

And as a novelist, it would be possible to access that.

But I couldn't access the story that this woman told about how she had adopted and abandoned a child.

I just could not find a story that she could have told herself, knowing what she was abandoning that child to.

And so I had to because I couldn't-- I had to give that up, yeah.

>> John Williams: But then you write in the book that “Horse,” with a tone of light surprise.

I think you write that “Horse” now seems as if it might be the one that readers like best of all.

So how do you feel about the book now, given both the difficulty that it presented, but also the incredibly emotional time that divided writing the first and the second half of it?

>> Geraldine Brooks: Well it-- obviously, I'm really happy about how it was received, and I was particularly proud and pleased that I got the Anisfield-Wolf Award, which is for literature that embraces diversity.

And it's been known for a long time as the Black Pulitzer.

And to receive that award was really affirming.

But in terms of the book itself, well, I couldn't-- I was halfway through it.

Tony had been really helpful.

He's a great archive diver, and he had brought me wonderful love offerings from the archives, things he found out about Lexington, the Horse and the people around Lexington.

And he'd really fueled the writing of the first half of the book, and I'd read it aloud to him, and he was really liking it and encouraging.

He loved that period of history so much more than some other periods that I'd written about.

But after he died, I could not get back to my desk.

I could not have the kind of focus you need.

I could barely read, much less write fiction.

And it took me a year.

And the pandemic and the quiet, enforced quiet of the pandemic to finally crawl back to my desk.

And I realized I needed to finish the book so I could dedicate it to him.

But it took an early reader to point out to me that it's really two different books.

That the second half of the book is absolutely infused with the grief that I was feeling for him, and the plot probably went where it went because of that.

>> John Williams: I have a couple more questions and then we will -- if people want to ask the microphones or up here in the front on either side of the aisles, And Geraldine will be signing at 10:45.

I'll remind you again of that later, downstairs in the convention center.

You say that Tony encouraged you to become a novelist after you'd had your first son.

You, I think, very fairly didn't want the dangerous life of the war correspondent anymore.

The number of children I need to not want to be a war correspondent is zero [laughter] but you're different.

What was his initial encouragement like?

And how did your own interest and feeling for that new vocation develop?

How quickly did you take to it and feel like, “oh?” >> Geraldine Brooks: Ah I was one of those kids who was never without a novel in their hand from the moment I could read.

So I loved novels, but I'd never -- I'd never thought of it as something that you could do.

I thought being a journalist was wildly ambitious enough for a girl from my time and place and backgrounds.

And I was very happy in that career.

But yeah, as you say, once I had an infant, I wasn't about to go off on these long, open-ended assignments because you have to follow the story wherever it leads.

You can't just say, I'm going for three days to cover a civil uprising and, or the battle of Fallujah.

It doesn't work like that.

You're embedded in there.

And I didn't want to do that.

And I thought, well, I'll just freelance.

But when you've done that kind of work for a decade, that's all anybody thinks of you for.

So I wasn't getting calls from people to say, why don't you go and hang around a swimming pool with Brad Pitt and write us a profile?

[laughter] It was always, do you want to go to Afghanistan or and I'm like, no, because I have to nurse my baby in an hour and a half.

So it was a bit of a quandary about what I was going to do.

And I was finishing my second book of nonfiction, and there'd been this story banging around in my head for ten years since we'd wandered into a little town in the Peak District in England.

And the extraordinary story laid out in the parish church about what had happened when bubonic plague struck the village in 1665, and the villagers voluntarily quarantined rather than flee and spread the infection, which is the only time in history that a community has voluntarily quarantined.

And I thought Id write about that.

And at first I was thinking nonfiction, but when I went back to Eyam, there was nothing, because it was a village of illiterate lead miners and shepherds, and nobody had set down a record of what it was like to live through that year of quarantine.

So the only way to engage with the material was through imaginative empathy and to try and write a novel, and I had no idea if I could.

So I wrote three chapters, and I sent them off to my non-fiction agent, Chris Dahl.

And I didn't hear anything and I thought, oh, it sucked.

And she's too polite to say.

And then I think it was 4 or 5 weeks later, she called up and she said, I've sold your book.

[laughs] >> John Williams: Is that right?

>> Geraldine Brooks: And then I had to write it.

[laughter] And lucky for me, somebody wanted to read it, and I got to keep doing it.

>> John Williams: I'm glad I asked.

I don't think I'd heard that story, that's great.

I've heard you say that you aren't-- that you weren't thinking of a readership when you wrote this book, which isn't surprising to me, but that you do when you write your novels very much so.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Oh, yeah.

>> John Williams: Which was partly interesting to me, because I imagine you've always had a very strong relationship with your readers.

I think the introduction called you beloved, and I had that written down, too, because I think there aren't many novelists who are.

But I think you're beloved novelist.

But I also imagine that the response to this book has been both different and its intensity has been different.

What has the reaction been like from everyday readers?

>> Geraldine Brooks: It's been overwhelming.

I have never got so many notes and emails about a book.

I had no-- I should have understood because it's coming for all of us.

And if you have written or emailed to me, I will write back.

But it's taking me a while because I can only do it in short bursts, because some of the stories that people share are so intense and I'm usually assiduous about answering, and I will, I will, I promise.

But it's just it's been a lot, but there's been a couple of stories that have just made me feel so good about writing this book.

And the best one was a woman who wrote to me and said she read the book, and she sent her husband for his first cardiology assessment, and he went straight to surgery because he was over 90% occluded and probably would have died.

So he's alive today, and that is wonderful.

>> John Williams: That's amazing.

Do come up to the mics if you want to ask a question.

We have a few more minutes but I've got plenty if you don't.

But we're happy to hear from you.

You also said in the same -- I only watched one interview you did previously.

I try not to overindulge, but when you talk to Michael Lewis last year and I think it was California, and he had mentioned that you only in the first sort of spate of publicity that you did for the book, you only talk to people who knew Tony personally.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Yes.

>> John Williams: And so I don't know if that changed over time, but thank you for allowing me to speak with you today.

I appreciate it.

I wish I had known Tony.

But I'm honored to be here.

I can imagine you not wanting to do any press at all for this book.

Was that a conversation?

>> Geraldine Brooks: I was very afraid of it.

Yeah, I was afraid of it.

And had I not done anything, I think they would have respected that I'm the rare novelist who has absolutely no complaints whatsoever about how I am published.

I love my team, they're wonderful.

But I decided that I wanted to talk about Tony.

And so I agreed to do the first eight events.

And they were all with people who had known him.

And I thought, that's okay, because we'll be talking about Tony and that I love to do.

And it wasn't as scary as I thought.

You know, it's not like usually when I go on book tours.

When I went on book tours for Horse, I basically spent 20 minutes talking about my misadventures as a Horsewoman.

And it's a lot of fun and how that led to the book.

And it's basically just a hilarious exchange with readers, and it's very warm and everything.

And this is different, so yeah.

>> Hi, is it working?

>> John Williams: We can hear you.

>>Geraldine, I was wondering, what you're working on now because the future is so, present, and you're so needed.

So I'm wondering what's, getting your attention and where you're going to go with that?

>> Geraldine Brooks: Well, I just finished working with Kamala Harris on her book, “107 days,” which is the story o the campaign.

[applauds] >> John Williams: That's out it's September 23rd.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Yeah, very soon.

And it was very unexpected.

I was actually in San Diego doing my last event for “Memorial Days,” and my agent called and said, “something's come up and would you consider it?” And I'm like, hell yeah.

And because I was in San Diego, they sent a car and I went and met her in LA.

And it was a privilege and it was intense.

And it just underlined for me what a tragic mistake this country made last year.

[applause] >>In “Horse,” I really enjoyed the DC local color and I was wondering, have you ever been a Washingtonian?

>> Geraldine Brooks: Well-- >> John Williams: Wait, wait.

Have you ever been what?

>> Geraldine Brooks: A Washingtonian?

My husband was a fourth generation Washingtonian, which is a rare breed, right?

but his immigrant family on both sides came to Washington from Shtetls in Belorussia.

And his great grandfather was the rabbi of, downtown synagogue here.

And then his grandfather and his father were both, one was a general surgeon and one was a neurosurgeon here in Washington.

My lovely father-in-law of blessed memory was Chair of Neurosurgery at Washington Hospital Center.

So I spent a lot of time here.

And I'm very sad that this is my first trip to Washington, where there are no Horowitzs in Washington, D.C., because his brother recently moved.

So, yeah.

>> Hi, Geraldine, hi.

I read your book, “People of the Book” in high school, and I decided from that book I wanted to become an art conservator.

And I'm now 27, and I'm just on Monday going to be starting work at Smithsonian American Art.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Woo hoo!

[applause] >>So first, I wanted to say thank you for writing that book.

I think it's touched me and a lot of my friends.

I'm texting my friends right now being like, I see her on stage.

But I'm wondering what [unintelligible] to you about conservation, and if you have any connections now to conservation or if you've kept up with that connection?

>> Geraldine Brooks: Yeah, I was able to reconnect with people who helped me on “People of the Book” for “Horse” because there's an art subplot there.

And so it was really wonderful to go back into those behind the scenes at the museum spaces where people are doing this incredible work.

What appeals to me about it is it's everything work, because you have to be a bit of an artist to understand the intent of the art.

You have to be a great craftsperson to work on it effectively, and you have to be a detective.

You know, the sleuthing that goes on in finding the origin of a piece and the provenance of it is just the most-- So great choice.

And I'm happy to report that finally, after many false starts, they're going to start filming “People of the Book” in Spain in January.

>> John Williams: Wow.

[applause] >> Geraldine Brooks: Well, I say that and then I should touch wood because these things have fallen over so many times.

But this one, they're actually in pre-production, so it might happen.

>> John Williams: We have time for a couple more.

Hello.

>> You're one of my favorite novelists, and I had read some of your books, and then I read “People of the Book,” and it inspired me-- I loved it, and it inspired me to try my hand at writing.

And I'm working now on a book, and I formed a critique group.

But I look up to you so much and thank you.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Well thank you.

>>It wasn't a question, sorry.

>>Geraldine Brooks: and keep writing.

>>I will.

Even if it doesn't get published, I could self-publish.

I just needed to do this.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Great.

That's the best reason to do it.

>> John Williams: How are you doing?

>> Good morning.

I just want to say thank you both to you, for writing historical novels and to Mr.

Horowitz as well.

Both of you inspired me to become a historical novelist and to help me become a historical novelist, I recently wrote a historical novel about Frederick Douglass, and it was published last year called “Frederick Douglass: A Novel”.

I thought I'd promote myself.

sydneymorrison.com, and you could find it.

But I do want to ask you about your work on the Civil War with March and his work on John Brown, because John Brown was a very close friend of Frederick Douglass.

>> Geraldine Brooks: And Frederick Douglass advised him not to do the raid on Harpers Ferry >>That's right, and indeed.

And that meeting where he tried to have him go to Harpers Ferry is in my book because it's so dramatic when he said this would not work.

It was suicidal, yes.

But I wanted to ask you about the influence of place geography in the writing of historical fiction.

That it's, how you incorporate your feelings about place in, your books.

Because I noticed you said about going to certain places and how it really impacted you.

And we have to go back into time.

And so I wondered how, going back in time is facilitated in your work?

>> Geraldine Brooks: I think it's absolutely essential to go to the places that you're writing about if there's anything still there.

But there usually is, even if it's only the way the light falls on the stone, even if it's only, what flowers come up in the spring or the feel of the air, even if the physical landscape is completely different.

I am a great believer in going to the place, and when I was briefly, I had a stint as a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Harvard, and I was shocked that kids thought they could do it by Google earthing.

>> Yes.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Don't be doing that.

>>Yeah, okay.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Do not be doing that.

You've got to get your butt to the place and hang out there.

And if I hadn't gone to Venice for the section of “People of the Book,” I would have made some tragic mistakes, because I wouldn't have understood that the ghetto was separated from the main city by a bridge that was not much bigger than this table.

So it was a very intimate thing.

And when I imagined the ghetto on an island, I saw it as like a more distant thing.

You have to go and walk the streets.

>> I didn't understand, Harpers Ferry until I stood above Harpers Ferry and looking down at that confluence of the Potomac and the Susquehanna.

You're absolutely right.

>>Geraldine Brooks: It's one of the most dramatic landscapes.

>> Yes, yes.

>>Geraldine Brooks: And anybody who hasn't been to Harpers Ferry should go.

It's fabulous.

>> Thank you so much.

>> Geraldine Brooks: Thank you.

>> John Williams: I'm so sorry to cut off.

What's the most heartwarming crowd I've ever had for a conversation.

A lot of inspiration in the room.

I love that.

We now have a very special presentation.

Can we just do one quick, one last quick-- >> A very quick one.

>> John Williams: Geraldine's the star.

So I'm not going to overrule her but-- >> Thank you, you had mentioned an earlier project that you didn't pursue on adoption, but I wondered if you are considering writing about adoption or adoptive parenting later in your career?

>> Geraldine Brooks: I am not, because I feel like that would be getting into my son's own story, and that story is his, and he will tell that in his own time and in his own way.

But I'm agitating about certain discriminations against adopted kids.

That's what I do in my copious free time is write letters to politicians.

[applause] >> John Williams: Thanks, Geraldine.

We now have a very special presentation from the Acting Librarian of Congress, Robert R. Newlen.

Don't forget to meet Geraldine at her signing, which starts at 10:45, in the lower level of the convention center.

But, Robert, come on down.

[applause] >> Robert Randolph Newlen: Good morning.

I have to compose myself.

I'm so excited to be on the stage with these two.

[applause] And before I jump in here, can I just ask you to thank our fabulous people that are in all these orange t shirts, our volunteers.

[applause] We have library staff, volunteers from the public Junior League.

We could not do it without them.

So we're so, so grateful to all of you.

I also want to thank our James Madison Council, the library's major philanthropic group, for sponsoring this stage and the festival.

So I'm making a lot of speaking appearances today.

I think this is number six.

but I have to tell you, this is the one I have been most looking forward to.

I have the great honor of conferring the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

The prize honors an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art, but also for its originality of thought and imagination.

The award commends strong, unique, enduring voices that throughout consistently accomplished careers have told us something essential about the American experience.

Previous winners of the prize include George Saunders, James McBride, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, who I had the pleasure of meeting, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth and Colson Whitehead.

This year's winner, Geraldine Brooks is the author.

Yes [applause] Author of six novels, including “Horse,” “People of the Book,” “Year of Wonders” and the Pulitzer Prize winning “March.” She has also written acclaimed works of nonfiction, including “Nine Parts of Desire” and “Foreign Correspondence,” and, of course, “Memorial Days.” Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies around the world.

Many people contributed to the selection of, Geraldine today, but I'm such a fan.

I was really pleased, when they recommended her and it's my pleasure to add this to the many honors that you have received for your fiction writing.

So with that, I hereby present the award, to Geraldine Brooks.

Geraldine, congratulations.

[applause] >> Geraldine Brooks: It is such a profound honor to receive this award from America's greatest Library and to be part of the tradition.

As somebody whose work is inspired by history, to now become enmeshed in the history of this library that was founded by John Adams.

I think with $500?

What was it, $5,000?

$500.

And then burned to the ground by the British and revived by Jefferson.

So being part of that history and also being part of the courage of librarians like yourself.

[applause] And like Carla Hayden.

[applause] Librarians have been the heroes, I think, of the past decades, because they were the ones who stood up against the Patriot Act when nobody else did.

And now they're the ones standing up for people's right to read.

And I think that there's a reason.

[applause] When my oldest son was ten, he was obsessed with a game called Warhammer.

And it was all these scary looking warriors.

But the biggest and scariest one was the librarian, because they are the ones who have access to knowledge and can share it with us all, and may they continue to lead us to the courage that we need in these times.