Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was reco...

Published to coincide with Vegemite's 100th anniversary, the fascinating true story of the man who invented Australia's most enduring cultural icon, fully revised and updated now the company is in Australian hands again. Today Vegemite is recognised around the world, but when the salty black past...

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70-19 BCE) became the world's first media celebrity, a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure; ...

"In this poignant memoir, Charles Spencer recounts the trauma of being sent away from home at age eight to attend a boarding school. A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed, firsthand account of a culture of cruelty at the school Spencer attended in his youth and provides important insights int...

In the story of the biggest school blow-up in Australian history, The Vetting of Wisdom is a gripping tale of a revered Principal-acclaimed nationwide as the leading girls' school educator of her day-loved and admired by all-but with a determined Presbyterian Church minority bent on getting rid o...

"Vicarious Dreaming documents a series of personal voyages between Cooktown and the Torres Strait that are interwoven with accounts of exploration, exploitation and escape. The travels and tales coalesce around the works of Ion Idriess and he lives of solitary men at the edge of the world, drawn ...

An incredible story of heroism, complicity and survival about a charismatic double-agent who played a major role in World War Two - Agent Victoire. VICTOIRE is about Mathilde Carré - codenamed 'La Chatte', the cat, then known as Agent Victoire - who was the exceptionally charismatic and daring fo...

"In the twilight years of her reign, after the devastating deaths of hertwo great love--Prince Albert and John Brown--Queen Victoria meets tall and handsome Abdul Karim, a humble servant from Agra waiting tables at her Golden Jubilee. The two form an unlikely bond and within a year Abdul becomes ...

When Alexandrina Victoria was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on 20 June 1837, she was 18 years old and barely five feet tall. Her subjects were fascinated and intrigued; some felt sorry for her. Writer Thomas Carlyle, watching her gilded coach draw away from the ...

Blazing her trail at the dawn of the 20th century, Vida Goldstein remains Australia's most celebrated crusader for the rights of women. Her life, as a campaigner for the suffrage in Australia, Britain and America, an advocate for peace, a fighter for social equality and a shrewd political comment...