Memorial Days

with Geraldine Brooks, hosted by Jennifer Byrne

9 March 2025

Geraldine Brooks, Sydney born and globally recognised as both a fearless foreign correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winning literary star, found herself thrown into sudden bereavement in a world that gives little space for it. Join her on her discovery of rituals old and new, leading to a unique path forward.

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I pretended to be normal after Tony’s death, and didn’t leave the house without putting on a costume and mask. I needed to use writing as my therapy.

Geraldine Brooks

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A love that endures through loss

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Brooks and her husband Tony Horwitz settled down to build a quiet life full of meaning and tenderness with their two boys. A joyful life that came to an abrupt end on Memorial Day 2019 with the sudden death of her beloved husband. Without space to grieve, her loss became a yawning gulf.

Her profoundly moving memoir, Memorial Days, is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between intertwined souls that captures the joy, agony and mystery of life. Geraldine is joined in conversation by Jennifer Byrne, dear friend to her and Tony, to discuss how to honour a person, endure their absence in ways both new and old, and rebuild a life after loss.

Presented by Sydney Opera House

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A white woman with short brown hair appears in the middle of a bright collage. Surrounding her head is a sunset and some rocks balancing on top of each other.

Geraldine Brooks (she/her)

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.

Jennifer Byrne (she/her)

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Jennifer Byrne started her career in journalism at a young age as a cadet journalist with the Age newspaper in Melbourne. At the age of 23, she was posted to California as the youngest-ever foreign correspondent for the Age.

In 1981, Jennifer moved to Sydney as founding reporter with Channel Nine's Sunday program and five years later, joined the reporting team at 60 Minutes. In 1993, she became the morning presenter of ABC Radio 2BL and in 1995, was appointed publishing director of Reed Books.

In 1999, having spent a couple of years as stand-in presenter for both ABC-TV's 7.30 Report and Lateline, Jennifer took up the anchor job at Foreign Correspondent, and spent five years as host and reporter, travelling with the program. She also continued to write features and book reviews and regularly hosted Radio National's Breakfast program.

In 2003 she joined the Bulletin magazine as a senior writer, working on a weekly column, for which she won several national awards. In May 2006 she developed and launched The Book Club at the ABC, along with a series of literary specials and interviews featuring such international guests as J.K.Rowling, Bill Bryson and Ian McEwan, and local authors including Tim Winton, Helen Garner and kids favourite Andy Griffiths.