Arthur Brooks’ wife is Ester Munt-Brooks, a native of Barcelona, Spain. The couple have been married for more than three decades, and their family story — including a move across continents for love, and a decision to adopt — runs through much of Brooks’s public writing about happiness.
Brooks himself is best known as a Harvard professor and bestselling author on happiness, leadership and the “second half of life”. His wife, by contrast, keeps a low public profile, and this article reports only what Brooks and his institutions have themselves made public.
Table of Contents
- Who Is Arthur Brooks’ Wife?
- How Arthur Brooks Met Ester
- Family and Children
- Arthur Brooks’ Career
- Net Worth
- Frequently Asked Questions
Who Is Arthur Brooks’ Wife?
Ester Munt-Brooks is from Barcelona, in Catalonia, Spain. Institutional biographies of her husband consistently describe her in those terms — “his wife Ester Munt-Brooks, who is a native of Barcelona” — and note that the couple live outside Boston, Massachusetts. She is not a public figure in her own right, and no separate professional biography of her is published by Harvard or his speaker bureaus.
How Arthur Brooks Met Ester
Brooks met Ester while touring in Europe as a young French horn player. In interviews he has told the story himself: he met her on a concert tour in France, where she was studying, then followed her to Barcelona — a city where he played in the orchestra — and spent about two years learning enough of the language to propose to her. “I moved to Barcelona in a bid to try to convince her to marry me,” he has said. “It took me two years, but I closed the deal.”
It is a fitting origin story for a man who now teaches that happiness depends less on achievement than on relationships: his own career change, from musician to academic, began with that relationship.
Family and Children
Arthur and Ester Brooks have three adult children: Joaquim, Carlos and Marina. Brooks has written openly about one family decision in particular: after studying research on how giving increases happiness, Ester suggested the couple adopt a child, and they went on to adopt their daughter from China. Brooks has described that decision as one of the happiest of his life, writing that his happiness “spikes every time she looks at me and I remember the magic day we met.”
Arthur Brooks’ Career
Arthur Charles Brooks was born on May 21, 1964, in Spokane, Washington, and raised in Seattle. He left college at 19 to play French horn professionally in the United States and Spain, returned to study in his late twenties, and earned a PhD in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He taught at Syracuse University, served as president of the American Enterprise Institute from 2009 to 2019, and then joined Harvard, where he taught leadership and happiness at the Kennedy School and Harvard Business School.
He is the author of more than a dozen books, including From Strength to Strength (2022) and Build the Life You Want (2023), co-written with Oprah Winfrey, and he writes the “How to Build a Life” column for The Atlantic. As of 2026 he has also taken up a professorship at Vanderbilt University while remaining a senior fellow at Harvard Business School.
Net Worth
There is no reliable, publicly audited figure for Arthur Brooks’ net worth, and this article does not invent one. His income sources are public — academic salaries, book royalties and speaking fees — but online estimates of his wealth vary and are not based on published financial records, so they should be treated as speculation only.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Arthur Brooks’ wife?
Ester Munt-Brooks, a native of Barcelona, Spain. The couple live outside Boston and have been married for more than 30 years.
How many children do Arthur and Ester Brooks have?
Three adult children: Joaquim, Carlos and Marina.
How did Arthur Brooks meet his wife?
On a concert tour in France while he was a young French horn player; he then moved to Barcelona, where she lived, and proposed after about two years.
How old is Arthur Brooks?
He was born on May 21, 1964, making him 62 in 2026.
