The State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW) has announced the 2025 winners of the National Biography Awards! The annual award celebrates excellence in biography, autobiography and memoir writing, from established and emerging authors. The National Biography Awards have been running since 1996, and this year was judged by Sylvia Martin (chair), Lech Blaine and Eda Gunaydin.
Winner of the National Biography Award
Australia’s richest prize for biographical writing and memoir
Bullet Paper Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars
Abbas El-Zein
Bullet Paper Rock tells of El-Zein’s life through war, loss and migration,‘anchored by his enduring love of languages’, said the organisers.
The judges praised El Zein’s ‘luminous prose that used a serious yet often intimate and playful voice to meticulously represent major historical moments across a vast geopolitical landscape, as well as explore “lexicons of love” and the ways in which language shapes identity’.
Sylvia Martin, the chair of judges, said, ‘Abbas El-Zein’s extraordinary memoir stood out in a diverse and creatively original field for the way it covers a vast terrain in a unique narrative style of short, dazzling “literary forays”. He has produced a singular literary achievement: a vitally important geopolitical story worth reading for the luminous and precise quality of the prose alone.’
By the time he graduated from high school, El-Zein had nearly drowned in the Mediterranean, survived the breakout of civil war and lived through the violent death of two close family members. He witnessed Syrian and Israeli soldiers invade his country and, from his bedroom balcony, saw the mushroom cloud of the explosion that killed hundreds of American and French marines. But while war and tragedy struck every now and then, everyday life continued unabated, rich with humour, serendipity and love of many kinds.
Bullet Paper Rock is a story of survival, and a meditation on desire and loss, language and violence. It is at once a requiem for a Levantine past gone sour - from the innocent 1970s, through September 11 and its aftermath, to the cataclysms of the Arab Spring – and a tribute to women of his family – 'weavers whose fabric of choice is hope, they were hard at work, at night as in daytime, carving out viable lives, ones in which they loved and were loved aplenty'.
Winner of the Michael Crouch Award
Awarded for a first published biography, autobiography or memoir by an Australian writer
John Berger and Me
Nikos Papastergiadis
This was presented to Nikos Papastergiadis for his debut biography John Berger and Me. ‘The quality of Nikos Papastergiadis’s perceptive, lyrical, subtly humorous prose also shone among a highly competitive field. A unique, stunning blend of biography and memoir,’ said Sylvia Martin, chair of judges.
In John Berger and Me, the eminent Australian sociologist Nikos Papastergiadis recalls his relationship with the late English writer and art critic John Berger. His memoir is both a portrait of their friendship, and an account of the work of his former mentor, one which combines Berger's abiding interest in migrants and migration, with Papastergiadis' reflections on his own family's experience of migration.
Berger was a successful author and artist who lived in England before he moved to a peasant village in the Haute-Savoie. Papastergiadias' father was born in a peasant village in Greece and migrated to work in factories in Australia. The memoir covers a period of ten years in the 1990s when the younger Nikos spent many summer months with the distinguished author, living in the family house and sharing duties like the gathering of the harvest. It draws on personal memories, his deep knowledge of Berger's work, which was the subject of his doctoral thesis, and anecdotes of life in the village, and beyond.
The intertwining of their common experiences means that the book is both a biography and an autobiography, as well as a tribute to one of the most significant cultural thinkers of recent times.
Explore the 2025 shortlist here and learn more about the award here.
