• Tim Bonyhady - Good Living Street: The Fortunes of My Viennese Family
• A J Brown - Michael Kirby: Paradoxes & Principles
• Delia Falconer - Sydney
• Paul Kelly - How to Make Gravy
• Mark McKenna - An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark
• Martin Thomas - The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist 

The winner of the National Biography Award receives $25,000 in prize money for a published work of biographical or autobiographical writing. This year for the first time, shortlisted authors will each receive $1,000 prize money in recognition of their achievement in the field of biography. The prize for the winning author has also been increased from $20,000 to $25,000, bringing the total prize pool for the Award to $31,000.
The National Biography Award was established in 1996 to encourage the highest standards of writing biography and autobiography and to promote public interest in these genres.

The award is administered and presented by the State Library of New South Wales on behalf of the award's benefactors, Dr Geoffrey Cains and Mr Michael Crouch AO.Chair of the Judging Panel Peter Rose:“the variety, calibre and sheer readability of the six shortlisted titles augur well for the ever-protean genre of Biography in the country, notwithstanding the many challenges currently facing authors and publishers. We learned so much from these books – about popular music, Australian history and anthropology, the politics and personalities of the judiciary, the character of our biggest capital city, and the huge personal toll for one family of the Nazi regime”.

Seizure is on the hunt for invigorating fiction and are launching a new novella competition for Australian and New Zealand writers.

If you sometimes think that novels are just obese novellas, then you’re on our wavelength. And since we are theme-lovers this time we are challenging all writers to tackle the theme: ‘Origin’. You can take this as the start of a series, the genesis of a character, a history or a myth.

What’s a novella? For our purposes a slim 20–50,000 words.

Why a novella?  It is a movie-length reading experience and perfect for a digital read. Longer than a short story and shorter than a novel, it’s an under-published form.

What’s the prize? There will only be one winner this time. Firstly they’ll receive a thousand dollars in unmarked bills. Secondly they’ll get put through the Seizure rock-crusher/editing machine. Thirdly the winner’s novella will be designed with the usual Seizure flair and unleashed onto the world in digital and printed form.

Entries close November 1, 2012. Shortlisting December and Releasing March 2013
Seizure is taking entries here: http://seizure.submishmash.com/submit

Eleven Seasons by Paul D. Carter has won the 2012 Australian/Vogel's Literary Award

About the Award:
The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award is one of Australia's richest and the most prestigious award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of thirty-five. Offering publication by Allen & Unwin and prize money totalling $20,000, The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award has launched the careers of some of Australia's most successful writers, including Tim Winton, Kate Grenville, Gillian Mears, Brian Castro, Mandy Sayer and Andrew McGahan. 


About the book and the author:
'Some guys are good at school and telling jokes or they have the latest stuff. Others are cricketers and basketball players: they can do things with the ball that make their classmates talk about them when they're not around. His thing is football. He becomes the centre of whichever team he plays for: he becomes the advantage.'
MELBOURNE, 1985. Jason Dalton sits on his bed and counts his football cards, dreaming of the day he too is immortalised in the public eye. He's young and gifted, a natural player who can do anything with the ball in his hand. If only everything else in his life was as obvious to him as playing.
GOLD COAST, 1991. The bottom has fallen out of Jason's life; he's now a high-school dropout, tired and wasted on the Gold Coast, with an explosive family secret still ringing in his ears. He needs to get his life back. But first he needs to find out who he is.
'A smashing book: heartfelt, tough-minded, occasionally shocking.' Geordie Williamson
The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award winner 2012

Paul D. Carter was born in Melbourne and spent much of his youth going to Collingwood Football matches with his Dad and brother, Marcus. In 2001, Paul completed a Bachelor of Arts with honours from Deakin University and, in 2008 completed a PhD while writing Eleven Seasons. In writing Eleven Seasons, Paul was able to integrate his own experience of growing up in Melbourne in the 1980s with his keen interest in modern Australian history. He is especially interested in the sociological aspects of AFL and sport in society, in particular its sometimes fraught relationship with women. Paul currently teaches English and Creative Writing to secondary students in the western suburbs, as part of the Teach for Australia Programme.

• Esi Edugyan:   Half Blood Blues  -   Canadian , 2nd Novel 
  
• Anne Enright:   The Forgotten  -   Irish, 5th Novel 
  
• Georgina Harding:   Painter of Silence  -   British, 3rd Novel 
  
• Madeline Miller:   The Song of Achilles  -   American, 1st Novel 
  
• Cynthia Ozick:   Foreign Bodies  -   American, 7th Novel 
  
• Ann Patchett:   State of Wonder  -   American, 6th Novel
  

The Prize was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible and is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman.