Biographies & True Stories Books

With a passport stamped 'never to return', St Petersburg intellectual and publisher Abram Kagan was expelled by Lenin in 1922, ending up in Berlin, where his young son Anatol would read the proofs of Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. But...

Time Flies Too is the sequel to 2021's beguiling and absorbing memoir Time Flies by Al Clark, who in its last paragraph married and settled in Australia after a Spanish village childhood, a Scottish boarding school education and nearly two decades of...

Clever Man: The Life of Paddy Compass Namadbara offers a unique perspective on the life and making of this Aboriginal Western Arnhem clever man or marrkidjbu.Born at the end of the 19th Century when the Western world had scarcely touched Arnhem Land,...

'Oodnadatta Country I can still see it, in my mind's eye, exactly as it was back in my time. The 'There are so many stories to tell of my life, and sometimes I think they are not of importance, but they are, because often it is the little details that...

'He looked down at his watch and saw that the long hand was overlapping the short, pointing towards twelve. The old year had passed and the new year had begun. He was swept by a feeling of loss and attachment to a past that was no longer there: If I were...

'I was confined, locked into my library, tracing my heartbeats from way, way back.'In Telltale, Carmel Bird seizes on an enforced isolation to re-read a rich dispensary of books from her past. A rule she sets herself is that she can consult only...

From the authorof Travels with My Angst andAny Guru Will Do, a vivid, nostalgic, and funny memoir of growing upin Hong Kong in the 1960s.Phil Brown's lifebegins in small town Australia - Maitland, NSW to be precise - but in 1963...

When she is four yearsold Amra Pajali realises that her mother is different. Fatima is loving butsometimes hears strange voices that tell her to do bizarre things. She isfrequently sent to hospital and Amra and her brother are passed around tofamily...

Jane Carswell began her working life at Pegasus Press shortly after its audacious publication of Janet Frame's novel Owls Do Cry, and years later she went on to write an award-winning memoir called Under the Huang Jiao Tree:...

'Oneof the most exciting  narrative historiesto come out of India.' William DalrympleIt was a scandal thatrocked the highest echelons of the British Raj. In 1891, a notorious jewellerand curio dealer from Simla offered to sell the world's...

In the spirit of Patti Smith's M Train, Road Series is both love story and elegy. Renowned musician Hugo Race's evocations of Melbourne, Sydney, the USA, Europe and Mali, and the life of a rock musician on the road are revealing, incisive and exquisitely...

This is the story of two flawed eccentrics. Everything they do subverts their firm intention of keeping up appearances. They meet just after the war in liberated Paris but they cannot quite free themselves from the many strings attached to them the old...

**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 true story of Horrie the Wog-Dog who was adopted by the Australian Signal Platoon of the Machine Gun Battalion, in spite of all rules against keeping pets, and how Horrie not only won his stripes as a valuable addition to the group but had the...

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...