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 winner was announced on Thursday, July 31.
“A unique, stunning blend of biography and memoir,” said awards chair Sylvia Martin.
The judges chose John Berger and Me for its “originality and clever, non-linear but accessible structure.”
Martin added that Papastergiadis’s work showed a “perceptive, lyrical, subtly humorous prose”.
John Berger and Me recounts Papastergiadis’s visits in the 1990s to the home of John Berger in the French village of Quincy. It explores the unusual friendship between Berger, an upper-class and prominent English cultural theorist, and Papastergiadis, the son of Greek migrants, from the Australia.
At the time, Papastergiadis was a doctoral student at Cambridge, writing his dissertation on Berger, whose influential Ways of Seeing (1972) transformed the art world.
Papastergiadis, whose parents came from a Greek peasant village, offers a warm tribute to his mentor in the book and expresses the deeper cleavages created by class and migration.
He explores their shared love of motorbikes, rembetika, and the grind and sweat of hay-making, while painting vivid portraits of Berger’s family, the villagers, and his own parents.
“There is a warm feeling of recognition that comes with the awarding of this prize,” said Papastergiadis to Neos Kosmos.
“However,” the author added, “it is also a strange feeling.”
“I have written so many other academic books and the reward for those books is always in how they open doors to further research and engagement.
“I never look back at these books but use them to move forward. With this new book, which is much more personal, there is a feeling of wanting to hold memories and to share them with others. It is very gratifying that others also want to stay with the diaspora stories in my book.”
Though now retired from academia, Papastergiadis said “that door has not closed entirely.” He told Neos Kosmos that he “plans to continue writing academic books and mentoring PhD students”.
His current passion, however, lies in looking at his family’s past. He is working on a new book, Black Sea Exile—”a story about refugees from the Pontus”.
Professor Papastergiadis who contributes also for Neos Kosmos occasionally has already begun to look at the exile of refugees from Asia Minor, in a deep and personal way.
Papastergiadis will appear at the State Library of NSW on August 16 for a talk with other shortlisted authors.
