Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

'The first time around these pieces were not widely heard or read. A roomful of festival-goers in Sydney or Penang or Ballarat could well have heard me hold forth on the subject of Enid Blyton, say, or kissing, it's true, and a few of my newspaper articles - my feuilletons, as I'm calling them - ...

When Luiz Schwarcz was a child, he was told little about his grandfather Laios, a Hungarian Jew. Only later would he learn that Laios had ordered his son, Luiz's father, to leap from a train taking them to a Nazi death camp, while Laios himself was carried on to his death. What Luiz did know was ...

Chronically questioning, funny, and bold, a young American writer explores the majority-Muslim lands that scare him most. Armed only with college Arabic and restless curiosity, Adam Valen Levinson set out to "learn about the world 9/11 made us fear." From a base in globalized and sterilized Abu D...

Behind every criminal man is a young, glamorous woman profiting from his crimes. Or, at least, so the media suggests. Felicia Djamirze is a counsellor, an advocate for women's justice, a three-time Miss Australia winner and a convicted drug dealer. Growing up surrounded by drug abuse and crime in...

Life in a castle isn't always a fairytale, as the Duchess of Rutland reveals in her charming, funny and eye-opening autobiography. Never in her wildest dreams did Emma Watkins, a Welsh farmer's daughter, imagine she would marry into the aristocracy but then she fell in love with David Manners, he...

The jaw-dropping and inspiring story of accidental queer icon Norman Scott (the hero of tv drama A Very English Scandal) and the part he played in one of the greatest political scandals of the twentieth century. In October 1975 an assassin tried to murder Norman Scott on Exmoor but the trigger fa...

Nine months after the spill that catapulted Scott Morrison to the top job, he won the 2019 election, surprising politicians and pundits throughout the nation. Yet, little was really known about the former marketing man whose hard-nosed political instincts and 'daggy dad' persona took him all the ...

Funny, poignant, charming and deeply sad at times, this is a beautifully written story of a life in teaching. Tim Heath taught for about 40 years, mostly in New Zealand but also in Samoa, in small country schools, in big city schools, at the Correspondence School, in primary schools and secondar...