• 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”.