National Biography Award

The National Biography Award was established in 1996. It is open to Australian citizens and permanent residents who have published a work of biography or autobiography. The prize is worth $20,000 and, since 1998, has been administered by the State Library of New South Wales on behalf of the award's benefactors, Dr Geoffrey Cains and Michael Crouch, A.M. The prize was awarded every two years until 2002 when it became annual.

 2009 winner

 
  Ann Blainey, I Am Melba, Black Inc, Sydney, 2008 
 

  
  I Am Melba website
 

 
2009 shortlisted works

• Ann Blainey, I Am Melba (Black Inc.)
• Andrew Faulkner, Arthur Blackburn VC: An Australian Hero, His Men, and Their Two World Wars (Wakefield Press)
• Charles Happell, The Bone Man of Kokoda (Macmillan)
• Christine and Michael Morton-Evans, The Flower Hunter: The Remarkable Life of Ellis Rowan (S&S)
• Greg de Moore, Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Fall (Allen & Unwin)
• Susanna De Vries, Desert Queen: The Many Lives and Loves of Daisy Bates (HarperCollins)

previous winners

2008 -  Philip Dwyer, Napoleon (Bloomsbury)
           Graham Seal,These Few Lines (ABC Books)
2007 -  Jacob Rosenberg, East of Time, (Brandl & Schlesinger)
2006 -  John Hughes, The Idea of Home (Giramondo)
2005 -  Robert Hillman,The Boy in the Green Suit (Scribe Publications)
2004 -  Barry Hill, Broken Song T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Random House)
2003 -  Peter Rose,The Rose Boys, (Allen and Unwin) 
           Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM (Random House)
2002 -  Jacqueline Kent, A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, a Literary Life, (Viking)
2000 -  Peter Robb, M, a Biography of European Painter Caravaggio (Duffy & Snellgrove)
           Mandy Sayer,Dreamtime Alice: A Memoir (Vintage)
1998 -  Roberta Sykes, Snake Cradle (Allen & Unwin)
1996 - Abraham Biderman,The World of My Past (AHB Publications)