Best Non-Fiction Book
Subcategory of Walkley Award
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Notes

  • This category of the Walkley Awards was inaugurated in 2005.

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2023

winner Antony Loewenstein for 'The Palestine Laboratory'.

Year: 2022

Indexed selectively. Also longlisted: Nathan Lynch (The Lucky Laundry), Alexandra Smith (The Secret), Andrew Quilty (Summer in Kabul). Also shortlisted: Louisa Lim (Indelible City).
winner y separately published work icon Currowan : A Story of Fire and a Community During Australia's Worst Summer Bronwyn Adcock , Carlton : Black Inc. , 2021 21935954 2021 single work autobiography

'Currowan is the gripping account of the massive fire that engulfed the south coast of New South Wales in 2019–20. Ignited by a lightning strike near the Currowan state forest and burning for seventy-four days across nearly 500,000 hectares, it was among the largest and most ferocious infernos of Australia’s Black Summer.

'Journalist Bronwyn Adcock fled the fire with her children. Her husband, fighting at the front, rang with a plea for help before his phone went dead, leaving her to fear: will he make it out alive? In Currowan, Bronwyn tells her story, and those of many others: what they experienced, saw, thought and felt. The pacy, immersive reportage is braided with much larger themes – what we know about how fire behaves, how that is changing due to climate change, and how communities can cope with natural disaster and prepare themselves for an increasingly dangerous future.

'Currowan is about tragedy, survival and the power of community. It is the story of a fire, and of a nation in the grip of an intensifying crisis we must all work together to solve.'

Source : publisher's blurb

Year: 2021

winner Kate Holden for 'The Winter Road'.

Year: 2020

winner Lucie Morris-Marr for Fallen: The Inside Story of the Secret Trial and Conviction of Cardinal George Pell

Year: 2019

winner y separately published work icon Any Ordinary Day Any Ordinary Day : Blindsides, Resilience and What Happens After the Worst Day of Your Life Leigh Sales , London : Hamish Hamilton , 2018 14402791 2018 single work autobiography

'In this wise and layered book, Leigh talks intimately with people who’ve faced the unimaginable, from terrorism to natural disaster to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Expecting broken lives, she instead finds strength, hope, even humour. Leigh brilliantly condenses the cutting-edge research on the way the human brain processes fear and grief, and poses the questions we too often ignore out of awkwardness. Along the way, she offers an unguarded account of her own challenges and what she’s learned about coping with life’s unexpected blows.

'Warm, candid and empathetic, this book is about what happens when ordinary people, on ordinary days, are forced to suddenly find the resilience most of us don’t know we have.' (Publisher's website)

Works About this Award

Undercover Susan Wyndham , 2009 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 5-6 December 2009; (p. 26)
A column canvassing current literary news including reports on the appointment of Kathy Bail as the new Chief Executive of UNSW Press, Graham Freudenberg's win the Walkley Awards and interim results from Australian Book Review's favourite novel poll.
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