El-Zein wins 2025 National Biography Award
Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars (Abbas El-Zein, Upswell) has won the 2025 National Biography Award.
El-Zein wins $25,000, while the other shortlisted authors receive $2000 each.
Bullet, Paper, Rock tells of El-Zein’s life through war, loss and migration,‘anchored by his enduring love of languages’, said the organisers.
Judges Sylvia Martin (chair), Lech Blaine and Eda Gunaydin praised El Zein’s ‘luminous prose that used a serious yet often intimate and playful voice to meticulously represent major historical moments across a vast geopolitical landscape, as well as explore “lexicons of love” and the ways in which language shapes identity’.
Martin said, ‘Abbas El-Zein’s extraordinary memoir stood out in a diverse and creatively original field for the way it covers a vast terrain in a unique narrative style of short, dazzling “literary forays”. He has produced a singular literary achievement: a vitally important geopolitical story worth reading for the luminous and precise quality of the prose alone.’
The Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work, worth $5000, was awarded to Nikos Papastergiadis for John Berger and Me (Giramondo), ‘a memoir of the deep friendship between Papastergiadis, the eminent Australian sociologist, and John Berger, the late English writer and art critic’.
‘The quality of Nikos Papastergiadis’s perceptive, lyrical, subtly humorous prose also shone among a highly competitive field. A unique, stunning blend of biography and memoir,’ said Martin.
The shortlisted writers and the winners will appear in conversation at the State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW) on 16 August 2025.
Last year’s winner was Lamisse Hamouda with Hazem Hamouda for The Shape of Dust: A father wrongly imprisoned, a daughter’s quest to free him (Pantera), while the 2025 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work was awarded to Jillian Graham for Inner Song (Melbourne University Publishing).
More information about the award is available from the SLNSW website.
Category: Awards Local news
