Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

Georgie Codd is scared of fish. Really, really scared, even on dry land there's no escape: Georgie sees sharks in the dining room, squid tentacles in the street, has nightmares of being stranded at sea. Granny Codd understands. She has spent her life beside the water, but won't so much as pa...

Joan Didion opened The White Album (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In tru...

"Ilham Tohti is an intellectual and economist, a prolific writer, and formerly the host of a website, Uyghur Online. In 2014, Tohti was arrested by the Chinese authorities, accused of advocating separatism, violence, and the overthrow of the Chinese government, subjected to a two-day trial, and s...

The star of Marvel's first Asian superhero film, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, tells his own origin story of being a Chinese immigrant, his battles with cultural stereotypes and his own identity, becoming a TV star, and landing the role of a lifetime. In this honest, inspiring and re...

"The memoirs of a celebrity costume designer describe her upbringing in the fashionable celebrity circles of her literary parents, her family's artistic but traumatizing approaches to shopping and how the fashion-savvy perspectives of her early years shaped her relationships and career."

Think you know Barnaby Joyce? Think again. The former Leader of the Australian National Party, and the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia between 2016 and 2018, Joyce's world came crashing down around him in spectacular fashion when it was revealed that he was expecting a child with new partner, ...

The expectations of a tree-change rarely meet the reality, but for TV weatherman-cum-farmer Graham Creed, being immersed in the weather every day, rather than just reporting on it from a studio, was an eye-opening and transformative experience. After leaving his television career behind in 2022, ...

On Wednesdays, Robert J.Hawke - Australia's 23rd and oldest living prime minister - has welcomed Derek Rielly into his home to share fine cigars adn irreverent conversation. On a sun-soaked balcony, the maverick young writer and the charismatic old master talk life, death, love, sex, religion, po...

Through a precious cache of WWII letters, a story of war is revealed. But also, most movingly, a story of love, resilience and survival, from award-winning and bestselling writer, Peter Rees. Doug Heywood was a grown man when he discovered, in a shoe box hidden in a wardrobe, a time capsule of so...