Biographies & True Stories

**Shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2024, Non-fiction**This book is a collected works of one of Australia's most accomplished media personalities. Chronicling his career since 2007, Close to the Subject presents a selection of pieces...

This stunning book is a biography and a generous sharing of Yorna's Culture and traditional beliefs. Explore the meaning of Country, Lalai ('Creation'), Wandjina, Woongudd (the 'Snake'), in the author's Country in the Kimberley region of Western...

Bill Dempsey is a humble achiever. He is known primarily as a champion footballer with West Perth and the Darwin Buffaloes. A premiership captain who played over 400 games in 20 seasons in Perth and the Northern Territory, and a member of the...

' This is my knowledge. It has been handed down to me from my grandmothers and grandfathers, my mothers and my fathers. I am sharing it with you because I want people to know about my life.'Ninu Grandmothers' Law is a definitive account of a traditional...

'Nanna was an imposing woman. She was large and dark, with strong arms and silver hair that fell to her waist ... Her scars bore testament to her physical adventures...yet she remained the epitome of femininity and strength.' - Gail Hunt, youngest...

'It has been over 100 years since our father was born, 80 years since Father enlisted in the AIF, and over 60 years since he died. How do we go beyond what we knew from our Mother's stories of him? The past, present and future need to be spoken about and...

WWII 1942-Broome, pearling town on the far north coast of Western Australia. The enemy was snaking its way towards the Australian coastline. Broome was being evacuated. The resident Japanese and their families had already been interned. Aboriginal...

In this montage of memoir, art, silk paintings, and photographs, Sally Bin Demin remembers her childhood growing up in Broome during the 1940s and 50s. As one of the 'after the war kids', Sally's lifestyle was embedded in the many cultural traditions of...

Age range 12 to 17Autobiographical study by a celebrated Aboriginal poet and playwright, who writes of his boyhood in the south-west of Western Australia during the depression years of the 1920s and 30s. Written with humour and compassion, this book...

The memoir of a deep friendship between two important intellectual figures bound by their interest in art and their experience of migration.In John Berger and Me, the eminent Australian sociologist Nikos Papastergiadis recalls his relationship with the...

In 2023 the Sydney Review of Books celebrates a decade online and the publication of more than a thousand essays and longform reviews of Australian and international literature. Over these ten years the SRB has cleared a unique space for serious...

An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past -...

How to Be Between is a memoir about female facial hair, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and negotiating identity for those visibly between gender binaries. Young women's bodies are relentlessly scrutinised and judged, so for most, the appearance of facial...

Final work by internationally acclaimed Australian author Gerald Murnane, reflecting on his career as a writer, and the fifteen books which have led critics to praise him as 'a genius on the level of Beckett'.A book which will appeal equally to Murnane's...

New collection of essays on the relationships between humans and animals, by Vanessa Berry, author of Mirror Sydney, and the memoir of adolescence Ninety9.Gentle and Fierce focuses on the world of animals, and the way their presence has shaped the...

Antipodean China is a collection of essays drawn from a series of encounters between Australian and Chinese writers, which took place in China and Australia over a ten-year period from 2011. The encounters could be defensive, especially given the need to...

*Shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize*No Documentis an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and...

Novelist Fiona McGregor'snew book, Buried Not Dead, is a collection of essays on art, literature and performance, sexuality, activism and the life of the city. It features performance artists, writers, dancers, tattooists and DJs, some of them famous,...

Carment is one of Australia's best-known plein air artists. It is his distinctive mark as a writer that he writes as he paints from life capturing the likeness of a particular place in time, remaining faithful to the moment when he sees...

IntimateAntipathiesis the much-anticipated new book by Luke Carman, the award-winning author ofthe cult classic An Elegant Young Man. The essays in this collectionfollow the writer in his oscillations through anxiety, outrage and ecstasy, andin the...

A Novel Idea is a memoir in photoessay form that follows Fiona McGregor's life as shewrites her award-winning novel Indelible Ink. It is a tongue-in-cheekrumination on the monotony and loneliness of the novelist's daily life, and theact...

Shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fictionLonglisted for the 2019 Stella PrizeThe follow-up to Fiona Wright's essaycollection Small Acts of Disappearance winner of the Nita B. Kibble...

Through delicately wrought essays and hand-drawn illustrated maps, Mirror Sydney charts an alternative view of the harbour city, to show a place of suburban mysteries, hidden stories, and anachronistic sites. Vanessa Berry, one of Australia's most acute...

When Zo Norton Lodge was growing up in Annandale in the eighties and nineties, the self-proclaimed Heartland of the Inner West was a heady brew of somewhat maladjusted and genuinely unsettling residents. But Annandale was changing. New words like...

Battarbee and Namatjira is the biography of two artists Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira, one white Australian from Warrnambool in Victoria, the other Aboriginal, of the Arrernte people, from the Hermannsburg Mission south of Alice Springs. From their...

The title of Robert Gray's autobiography is drawn from a poem by the famous Australian poet Christopher Brennan, 'The land I came thro' last was dumb with night / a limbo of defeated glory, a ghost'. There is more glory than defeat in this work, though,...

The short but remarkable career of American jazz guitarist, Emily Remler (1957-1990), ended with her death, amid still-disputed circumstances, in Sydney in 1990 while on tour. Emily played with virtually all the major jazz guitarists of the era and...

Judith has an amazing voice and writes poems that make you feel something. That's why I love her poetry. - Vanessa Page in Facebook, 2015After reading Flares I popped it in my bag and carried it with me so I could open it at any time (and I have) and...

Warm and wry, mixing high culture and suburban realism, the laconic and the artful, Anything Can Happen is a memoir from one of Australia's literary trailblazers. Funny, heartbreaking, it has exactly the arc of a good story, with a theme about...

THE RIOTOUS ROLLERCOASTER RIDE OF ONE OF AUSTRALIA'S GREATEST BANDS FROM 1976-2019.A superbly researched and written account of one of Australia's most popular bands, with unfettered access to all the key players, and a defacto social history of a time...

What's a life look like when the reader only gets to see the birthdays? The Birthday Scrolls is a memoir of Newcastle bohemian Geoff Nicholls' birthdays between the ages of 21 and 60. Pre-gentrification Newcastle, bands and parties mingle with visits to...

Poetry and the Trace is a compelling collection of critical essays by poets and scholars, offering fresh and teasing reflections on the art of contemporary poetry. As the volume's title declares, poetry is enmeshed with 'the trace', Derrida's 'mark of...

Many of us gain inspiration, solace, beauty and a sense of wonder from our interactions with nature, and writers have long plumbed and explored these depths.At the same time as many of us tune in to natural landscapes, our environment is imperilled as...

In 1975, as Gough Whitlam's government hurtled towards its demise, a nineteen-year-old arts student at the University of Melbourne, Kim Carr, began a long march.Raised in an avowedly blue-collar household headed by his boilermaker father, Carr eschewed...

An idealist as well as a pragmatist, and someone who believes passionately in equality, democracy and empowerment, Race Mathews has inspired and mentored many.Race was principal private secretary to Gough Whitlam in the lead-up to Whitlam's election as...

Whenever anyone tells you that only the big parties or star candidates have a chance of winning a seat in federal parliament, just say 'Cathy McGowan'. Running as a community-backed independent candidate, Cathy won the previously safe Liberal seat of...

Ken Inglis was one of Australia's most creative, wide-ranging and admired historians. During a scholarly career spanning nearly seven decades, his humane, questioning approach - summed up by the recurring query, 'I wonder...' - won him a large...

Geoffrey Blainey is often described as Australia's greatest livinghistorian, a writer whose prolific output includes such iconic books about thecountry's past as The Tyranny of Distanceand Triumph of the Nomads.However, Blainey has also been a...

From the maelstrom of the Depression and World War II, fromCommunist Party membership in the 1930s-1950s, and early attachment to thefeminism and peace, Jean Blackburn emerged as a significant publicintellectual. Her life work was the attachment of...

Comicactors have made a particularly strong contribution to cultural life inAustralia over the past sixty years. They have brought a range of memorablecharacters to the stage, television and film; they have transformed our imageof ourselves, helped to...

Geoffrey Bolton was the most versatile and widely travelled of his generation of Australian historians. As a scholar, teacher and commentator he enriched understanding of the country's regional mosaic, some of its notable figures and others who were just...

A still moment captured by a camera's shutter. The rapid fire of the mouse in a tight League of Legends match. The protracted sound of a door closing with finality.In the eighteenth edition of this creative anthology, twenty-six writers explore...

**2021 National Biography Award, highly commended****2020 NSW Premier's History Awards, shortlisted**A new edition of this acclaimed biography of an unsung literary talent.Australian poet and journalist Zora Cross caused a sensation in 1917 with...

When Jewish survivors of the Holocaust arrived in Australia after World War II, they were filled with hope that they could build a new life. These survivors found themselves in a country not only blessedly far from the chaos of post-war Europe but also...

My father, political activist Samuel Mark Goldbloom, was my hero and my nemesis all the days of his life.Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo grew up in thrall to her father, a prominent socialist and covert member of the Communist Party. From an early age, she...

Tarenootairer (c.180658) was still a child when a band of white sealers bound her and forced her onto a boat. From there unfolded a life of immense cruelty inflicted by her colonial captors. As with so many Indigenous women of her time, even today the...

The death of a bird haunts the relationship between two siblings. A lonely narrator waits for a bus that never comes. A boy makes soup with his grandmother and wonders about the memories she has buried.For the sixteenth edition of Verge, we asked...