John Berger and Me by Nikos Papastergiadis wins 2025 Michael Crouch Award
Nikos Papastergiadis’s literary non-fiction work John Berger and Me has won the 2025 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work in the National Biography Awards. The announcement was made on 31 July on ABC Radio.
‘A unique, stunning blend of biography and memoir,’ says awards chair Sylvia Martin. ‘The judges chose John Berger and Me for the debut award for its originality and clever, non-linear but accessible structure. The quality of Nikos Papastergiadis’s perceptive, lyrical, subtly humorous prose also shone among a highly competitive field.’
Read the judges’ comments below.
The substance of John Berger and Me is implicit in its title. In an original hybrid form, Nikos Papastergiadis recounts the regular visits he made in the 1990s to John Berger’s home in the French village of Quincy. This unusual friendship began when the author was a doctoral student at Cambridge, writing his dissertation on Berger, the English cultural theorist, artist and novelist, whose still-relevant Ways of Seeing (1972) transformed the art world.
Nikos Papastergiadis, the son of immigrants from a Greek peasant village, offers a warm tribute to his mentor in John Berger and Me. He describes his book in painterly terms as a ‘likeness’, which takes the form of ‘a sequence of anecdotes … fragments’. The gifted storyteller explores the two men’s shared love of motorbikes, rembetika and the grind and sweat of hay-making, and creates vivid portraits of Berger’s family, the villagers and the author’s own parents. The broader conversation covers migration and belonging as well as the existential problems facing an agrarian peasantry in the modern world.
Nikos Papastergiadis studied at the University of Melbourne and University of Cambridge. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology.
Papastergiadis will be appearing at the State Library of NSW on August 16 for a talk with other shortlisted authors. Learn more here.
