Behrouz Boochani also won the Victorian Premier’s Award. He sent his manuscript from where he is interred on Manus Island, by WattsApp.

He accepted the National Biography Prize, also by Wattsapp…

The State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW) has announced No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani (Picador) as the winner of this year’s $25,000 National Biography Award.

The judges praised Boochani’s book for its ‘poetic and epic writing’, calling it ‘profoundly important, an astonishing act of witness and testament to the lifesaving power of writing as resistance.’

Sofija Stefanovic was awarded the inaugural $5000 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work for Miss Ex-Yugoslavia (Viking). The judges said Stefanovic’s book is a ‘finely observed and ambitious debut memoir which is a thoughtful and tender addition to the genre of migration stories’.

The winners were chosen from a shortlist of six. The judging panel comprised Margy Burn, Georgina Arnott and Iain McCalman.

For more information about the award, visit the SLNSW website.