Caroline Brothers

University of Westminster (Cavendish)

Caroline Brothers is a novelist who explores the lives of ordinary people dealing with the aftermath of extraordinary events. Her first novel, Hinterland, about two Afghan boys walking across Europe, won a Society of Authors award and was adapted for theatre as Flight. In early 2018, the award-winning production transferred from Edinburgh to New York, where the New Yorker described it as ‘profoundly imaginative… unforgettable in both content and form’.

Where Hinterland drew on her reporting about immigration around Europe, her second novel, The Memory Stones, was informed by interviews and historical research. It follows what happens to a family when their daughter disappears during Argentina’s ‘dirty war’, and traces the parallel story of a young woman in flight from the truth.
Caroline’s first book, War and Photography, grew out of her history PhD at UCL and examines the way the grammar of modern war photography was laid down during the Spanish Civil War. Before becoming a novelist, she was a foreign correspondent with Reuters and the New York Times International Edition, most notably in Mexico and France. She has been published in most of the world’s top newspapers, and acted as a judge at a human-rights film festival in France.
Born in Australia, Caroline has had extensive experience with the challenges of writing prose. As a journalist and editor, she was confronted daily with the need for clarity of communication. Living and working in foreign languages, meanwhile, means she has long grappled with getting words to say what she means.

Caroline Brothers


University of Westminster (Cavendish) 2019/20
University of Westminster (Harrow) 2018/19