Judging Panel 2015

Professor Melanie Nolan (Senior Judge) is the Director of the National Centre of Biography and General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography at the Australian National University.  Her publications include Breadwinning (2000) a history of women and the state; Kin (2005) a collective biography of a working-class family, which won the 2006 ARANZ Ian Wards Prize and was short-listed for the 2007 Ernest Scott Prize; War and Class: The Diary of Jack McCullough (2009); and, most recently, general editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 18 (2012). She is the co-ordinator of the Masters of Biographical Research and Writing at the ANU and chairs the Editorial Committee of ANU press’ series in biography, ANU.Lives.

Dr Peter Cochrane is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is a freelance writer and an Honorary Associate in the Department of History, University of Sydney. He is the author and editor/author of ten books and his awards include The Age Award for Non-Fiction, the Age Book of the Year and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History for Colonial Ambition (2006). He is a writer of non-fiction, fiction, opinion and travel. His most recent book is the novella Governor Bligh and the Short Man (Penguin, 2012). The novella was long-listed for the Waverley Award for Literature (2013).

With Professor Julianne Schultz he jointly edited the most recent Griffith Review - Griffith Review 48 Enduring Legacies (2015).

A forthcoming essay on the voluminous World War I diaries collection at the State Library of New South Wales will appear in Humanities Australia (no. 6, 2015) to be published in July this year.

Rosemary Sorensen is a reviewer and journalist, previously editor of the Australian Book Review, books and arts editor at the Courier-Mail in Brisbane, and arts writer for The Australian. She is currently artistic director of Bendigo Writers Festival.