Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

Helen Garner is one of Australia's most important and most admired writers. She is revered for her fearless honesty in the pursuit of her craft. But Garner also courts controversy, not least because she refuses to be constrained by the rules of literary form. She has never been afraid to write he...

A former CIA officer and curator of the CIA Museum reveals the untold story of Ernest Hemingway's secret life as a spy for both the Americans and Soviets before and during World War II, and explores how his espionage activities influenced his literary work.

John Berger is one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art through Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political act...

'My first tenet is write about what is urgent. Good literature, I believe, arises out of a pressing need to express something. Isn't creative writing all about being possessed, seized, obsessed? It's like sexual desire: you cannot sensibly choose what to be attracted to. Urgent subjects reside in...

With entertaining anecdotes, insider accounts, and expert analysis, Ivereigh's journey through the key episodes of Francis's reform in Rome and the wider Church brings into sharp focus the frustrations and fury, as well as the joys and successes, of one of the most remarkable pontificates of the ...

A warm, witty and uplifting book about how our families make us who we are... When satirist John Clarke died in April 2017, many people mourned his passing as if they had lost a friend or a member of the family. Many of us felt we grew up with him. After all, for the best part of half a century, ...

Born in the fifties to a Sierra Leoneon mother battling mental health problems, Ronnie Archer-Morgan spent his childhood in and out of care. After difficult beginnings, marked by abuse, racism and brushes with both criminals and the police, he got into music, managing to get DJ gigs and, later, a...

Bharti Dhir faced many challenges in her childhood that could have broken her. As a baby, she was abandoned at a bus stop in Uganda before being adopted by Punjabi-Sikh parents. Growing up as a biracial, female child and a refugee, she experienced an insidious chain of racism and sexism in her co...

"The moving memoir of a girl coming of age as an immigrant in America who finds her calling as a scientist at the forefront of the AI/Machine Learning revolution. Fei-Fei Li is known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence (AI). But her career in ...

Clarice Beckett was one of Australia's most important early Modernist painters, excelling in portraiture, still-life and landscape. The discovery of a trove of her artworks has led to her remarkable talent and evocative art being recognised afresh and greatly admired. Clarice Beckett was self-eff...