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National Biography Award
Subcategory of Awards Australian Awards
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History

The National Biography Award was established in 1996 to encourage the highest standards of writing biography and autobiography and to promote public interest in these genres.

The award is administered and presented by the State Library of New South Wales on behalf of the award's benefactors, Dr Geoffrey Cains and Mr Michael Crouch AO.

The winner of the National Biography Award receives prize money for a published work of biographical or autobiographical writing. Shortlisted authors also receive a sum of money.

Source: http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about/awards/national_biography/ Sighted: 29/11/2013.

Notes

  • For a published work of biographical or autobiographical writing, the winner of the National Biography Award receives $20,000 in prize money. The National Biography Award was established in 1996 to encourage the highest standards of writing biography and autobiography and to promote public interest in these genres. The National Biography Award is administered and presented by the State Library of New South Wales on behalf of the award's benefactors, Dr Geoffrey Cains and Mr Michael Crouch AO.

Latest Winners / Recipients (also see subcategories)19971754

Year: 2021

winner (Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work) y separately published work icon One Bright Moon Andrew Y.M. Kwong , Sydney : HarperCollins Australia , 2020 18587081 2020 single work autobiography

'From famine to freedom, how a young boy fled Chairman Mao's China to a new life in Australia

'Andrew Kwong was only eight when he witnessed his first execution. The desperate scene left him sleepless, anxious and doubtful about his fervour as a revolutionary in Mao's new China. Yet he knew if he devoted himself to the Party and its Chairman he would be saved. That's what his teacher told him.

'Months later, it was his own father on trial. This time the sentence was banishment to a re-education camp, not death. Yet it left the family tainted, despised, and with few means of survival during the terrible years of persecution and famine known as the Great Leap Forward. Escape seemed the only solution, and it would be twelve-year-old Andrew who undertook the perilous journey first.

'This is the poignant, resonant story of a young boy's awakening - to survival, education, fulfilment, and eventually to a new life of freedom in Australia.' (Publication summary)

winner y separately published work icon Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse Cassandra Pybus , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2020 18268689 2020 single work biography

'Cassandra Pybus' ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, just off the coast of south-east Tasmania, throughout the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn't know this woman was Truganini, and that she was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne, of whom she was the last.

'The name of Truganini is vaguely familiar to most Australians as 'the last of her race'. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy: the extinction of the original people of Tasmania within her lifetime. For nearly seven decades, she lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than most human imaginations could conjure. She is a hugely significant figure in Australian history and we should know about how she lived, not simply that she died. Her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy.

'Cassandra has examined the original eyewitness records to write an extraordinary account of this lively, intelligent, sensual young woman’s life. Both inspiring and heart-wrenching, Truganini's story is now told in full for the first time.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 2020

winner y separately published work icon Tiberius with a Telephone : The Life and Stories of William McMahon Patrick Mullins , Melbourne : Scribe , 2018 13911959 2018 single work biography

'The oddly compelling story of a man regarded as Australia’s worst prime minister.

'William McMahon was a significant, if widely derided and disliked, figure in Australian politics in the second half of the twentieth century. This biography tells the story of his life, his career, and his doomed attempts to recast views of his much-maligned time as Australia’s prime minister.

'In office, McMahon worked furiously to enact an agenda that grappled with the profound changes reshaping Australia. He withdrew combat forces from Vietnam, legislated for Commonwealth government involvement in childcare, established the first Department of the Environment, and accelerated the timetable for the independence of Papua New Guinea. But his failures would overshadow his successes, and by the time of the 1972 election McMahon would lead a divided, tired, and rancorous party to defeat.

'A man whose life was coloured by tragedy, comedy, persistence, courage, farce, and failure, McMahon’s story has never been told at length. Tiberius with a Telephone fills that gap, using deep archival research and extensive interviews with McMahon’s contemporaries and colleagues. It is a tour de force — an authoritative, compelling, and colourful account of a unique politician and a vital period in Australia’s history.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 2019

winner y separately published work icon No Friend but the Mountains : Writing From Manus Prison No Friend but the Mountains : The True Story of an Illegally Imprisoned Refugee Behrouz Boochani , Omid Tofighian (translator), Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2018 14342605 2018 selected work prose

'Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains...

'Since 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani has been held in the Manus Island offshore processing centre.

'People would run to the mountains to escape the warplanes and found asylum within their chestnut forests...

'This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile.

'Do Kurds have any friends other than the mountains? '  (Publication summary)

Year: 2018

winner y separately published work icon The Enigmatic Mr Deakin Enigmatic Mister Deakin Judith Brett , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2017 11523887 2017 single work biography

'This insightful and accessible new biography of Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second prime minister, shines fresh light on one of the nation’s most significant figures. It brings out from behind the image of a worthy, bearded father of federation the gifted, passionate and intriguing man whose contributions continue to shape the contours of Australian politics.

'The acclaimed political scientist Judith Brett scrutinises both Deakin’s public life and his inner life. Deakin’s private papers reveal a solitary, religious character who found distasteful much of the business of politics, with its unabashed self-interest, double-dealing, and mediocre intellectual levels. And yet politics is where Deakin chose to do his life’s work.

'Destined to become a classic of biography, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin is a masterly portrait of a complex man who was instrumental in creating modern Australia.' (Publication Summary)

Year: 2017

winner y separately published work icon Before Rupert : Keith Murdoch and the Birth of a Dynasty Tom D. C. Roberts , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2015 9015448 2015 single work biography

'Following the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, Rupert Murdoch said his greatest regret was that he had let his father down. Popular history views Sir Keith Murdoch (1885–1952) as a fearless war correspondent – author of the famous letter that led to the evacuation of the Anzac force from Gallipoli – and a principled journalist and dedicated family man who, on his death, left a single provincial newspaper to Rupert. This benign reputation is unsurprising: the two previously published biographies of Keith were Murdoch family commissions.

But is there another side to the story of Keith’s success and the origins of News Corporation?

With controversial revelations – of forgotten fiancées, First World War propaganda operations, the promotion of eugenics, and the sensationalising of a schoolgirl’s murder leading to the execution of an innocent man – Before Rupert is an unflinching prequel to the saga of the Murdoch family’s rise to power, and details how Keith Murdoch ruthlessly exploited his influence and networks to gain control over Australia’s media and political landscape. (Publication summary)

Works About this Award

UnAuthorised : Commissions, Omissions and Unpublished Books Tom D. C. Roberts , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: Sydney PEN Magazine , November 2018; (p. 29-34)

'Tom D.C. Roberts, winner of last year’s National Biography Award for Before Rupert: Keith Murdoch and the Birth of a Dynasty, delivered this year’s National Biography Award Lecture.'  (Introduction)

Tim Winton, Helen Garner, Paul Keating, Deng Adut : The Stories behind the Year's Best Biographies Tim Winton , Deng Adut , Bernadette Brennan , Joan Healy , Judith Brett , Troy Bramston , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 12 July 2018;

'Six authors nominated for the National Biography awards reveal what most surprised them about their subjects.' (Publication abstract)

Brenda Niall Wins the National Biography Prize for Mannix Susan Wyndham , 2016 single work column
— Appears in: Brisbane Times , 8 August 2016;
'In researching her biography of Daniel Mannix, the Archbishop of Melbourne for 46 years, Brenda Niall was surprised to find how liberal his views were on most issues: he opposed World War I conscription, capital and corporal punishment, and the White Australia policy; supported the church reforms of Vatican II; and called for more openness in teaching children about sex. ...'
Brenda Niall's Life of Archbishop Mannix Wins Australia's Oldest Literary Prize Jason Steger , 2016 single work column
— Appears in: Brisbane Times , 6 July 2016;
'Among the first things Brenda Niall read about the novelist Martin Boyd, one of her early biographical subjects, was that in 1928 he had been the inaugural winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel The Montforts. It was published under the pseudonym Martin Mills because Boyd had based the book on his mother's family. Winning the medal revealed his real identity. ...'
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