Pulitzer-winning novelist and journalist Geraldine Brooks will visit Liberty Hall at 7:30 p.m. Friday as part of the Lawrence Public Library's Beach Author Series. Brooks will be interviewed that evening by Lawrence author and University of Kansas assistant professor of English Laura Moriarty. The program is free and open to the public; doors open at 6:30 p.m.

On Friday, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks will visit downtown’s Liberty Hall as part of the Lawrence Public Library’s Beach Author Series. Here, the Aussie author (raised in suburban Sydney, Brooks now lives stateside with her husband — fellow Pulitzer winner Tony Horwitz — and children) and former Wall Street Journal reporter shares insight into her novels, how fiction writing differs from journalism and the stories she’d like to tell next.

The following is a condensed and edited version of Brooks’ interview with the Journal-World. You can catch her at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Liberty Hall, 644 Massachusetts St. The event is free and open to the public.

I’d read somewhere that your father was a newspaper editor. Is that what got you interested in writing?

He was a proofreader, actually, in the days when they (newspapers) had such a valuable thing (laughs). I really can trace my desire to be a journalist from visiting him at work when I was only 8 years old. It just happened to be the afternoon when the afternoon edition was about to go to press, and he took me down to the print floor and just the incredible power of the scene down there was so exciting, when the foreman hit the big red button that made the presses run, and the newsprint flying across the room and being the first to get that paper. And it literally was warm when he handed it to me — I’ll never forget it. It was hot off the presses.

It just struck me that that was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to be a part of. So, I sort of channeled all my studies toward what would make me a desirable hire for a newspaper, and luckily I got a job as a cub reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald when I got out of college.

Could you have imagined at that point in your career that your Pulitzer would be for your work as a novelist and not as a journalist?

You know, that was beyond the ambit claim of the imagination of a working-class girl from Sydney. That was just something that was just so ridiculous I can’t believe it happened. I’d been out of journalism for a number of years when I was lucky enough to get the Pulitzer for “March.” And I remember the day that it happened, because when you’re not in a newsroom anymore, you’re not as aware of the Pulitzers looming.

It was a long way from my mind that day, and when the phone rang at 3 o’clock, it was an old colleague of mine that had seen it (the Pulitzer news) on the wire. I just didn’t believe him. I basically hung up on him (laughs).

Your 2005 novel “March” takes a closer look at the patriarch of the March family who serves as Union Army chaplain in “Little Women.” Being a writer, did you see yourself at all in Jo March?

Yes, of course. I think we all have a March girl that we identify with, and everybody who ends up writing always identifies with Jo (and) her absolute fierce determination to fulfill that destiny. And there’s so much of Louisa (May Alcott) in Jo.

But I didn’t start off thinking about “Little Women” at all. I was thinking about idealists at war and the idealists particularly of the Civil War. I was living in Virginia at the time in a town that had been settled by Quakers, and the history of that town is that, when the Civil War broke out, some of the young men thought that slavery was a worse evil than violence. And so they were read out of their Quaker meeting because they took up arms to fight on the Union side.

That was such a remarkable example of idealism at work, and I just wondered what happened to those young men when, having gone to war for a moral cause, were inevitably asked to do things that they would consider immoral in the course of it.

You’ve written a lot of historical fiction. Do you see that at all as an extension of your work as a journalist? As in, taking complex issues and attempting to give them a human face, to make the topic less abstract for readers?

That was the whole thrust of what I tried to do all those years as a foreign correspondent covering conflicts in the Middle East and certain parts of Africa and then in the Balkans — to take people one by one. Because if you say “Syrians,” it doesn’t mean anything. But, as we saw, if it’s a toddler dead on a beach, it means something. So, it’s that total bring-it-down-to-the-singular-human-story. That’s how I tried to do my journalism, and there is some kinship with the fiction.

And I think why I like to write about the past is, if I’m going to write about the present, I still want to be a journalist; I still want to go out and find out what’s really happening, because you can. But in the past, there were these voids where the voices were silent, because people didn’t get a chance to tell their own story. And so I like to go back to these remarkable moments when something extraordinary happened and you know the outline but you don’t know what it felt like.

Your newest novel, “The Secret Chord,” is about King David. I know you were raised Catholic but converted to Judaism when you married your husband. Did your conversion cause you to re-examine or see the story of David differently at all?

The timing of my conversion was around my marriage, and it was because I didn’t want to be the end of the line for my husband’s Jewish heritage. A Jewish family survived the 20th century and all the centuries before it — I didn’t want it to end with me. The teaching in Judaism is that the faith is carried through the mother, so that was why.

But I’d always had a passionate interest in Jewish history. I can’t really put my finger on it (but) I think it was because my father had actually served in the Australian Army in Palestine during World War II and he was a bit of a Leftie, so he was interested in the kibbutz movement. I guess that’s what got me interested was the modern history of the founding of Israel. But then I went back and I got fascinated by the Second World War and the Spanish Inquisition. So, the interest was there from the time I was, I think, about 15, so it was a kind of a natural step to take.

I’d read that you and your son, for your research for “The Secret Chord,” spent a day sheep herding in Israel. What was that like?

I was struck by how many of the important characters in the Old Testament start off as shepherds, and I was wondering what is it about herding sheep that makes it such a great entry-level position for future Israeli CEOs, you know. And I like to get the things right that you can get right, and when you’re talking about such a distant time as the Second Iron Age, one of the few things that hasn’t changed is the underlying landscape and the way light moves across the hills and the feeling of being out on a hillside with a flock. Those are the ways you can connect with the past and time travel a little bit, so I wanted to do as much of that as I could.

Do you have a bucket list of topics or historical eras you’d like to tackle next?

I always have a million ideas circling like planes at Newark Airport. It’s just, which one do you wave in next? And I know what I’m working on next. It’s another historical novel with a braided narrative set in three distinct time periods. It involves a famous racehorse and a missing painting of that horse, and I can’t wait to get started on it. So, as soon as I get home from the book tour that starts tomorrow, I will be plunging into that one.