The judges are Associate Professor Terri-ann White (chair), Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Western Australia, Eve Abbey of Abbey Books, and Tom Shapcott, Professor of English, University of Adelaide.

The National Biography Award is administered and presented by the State Library of NSW on behalf of its generous benefactor, Geoffrey Cains.

The State Library's National Biography Award series for 2004 will feature special events with acclaimed war correspondent Kate Adie OBE, author and human rights campaigner Anne Deveson AO, and Australia's most celebrated contemporary poet Peter Porter.

SECRETS AND SPIES: THE HARBIN FILES
by Mara Moustafine

"This extraordinary tale of travels, survivals and burdens of suspicion will fascinate readers"
-Tom Keneally

"Mara Moustafine uses extraordinary descriptive power to bring back to life a family she has never met. She has transformed Stalin's victims into people you can almost touch and speak with, so detailed is her portrayal of their lives, so deep her own angst at the tragedy which beset them"
-Monica Attard

From secret police files retrieved from the archives in post-Soviet Russia to the horror of Stalin's purges, Secrets and Spies:The Harbin Files unravels the complex historical forces which shaped a family's destiny.

Harbin in north China was once the heart of a vibrant Russian community of diverse cultural and political origins. But by the mid-1930s, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria drove many Russians to seek refuge elsewhere.

For the thousands who returned to their motherland in the Soviet Union, it was a bitter homecoming. At the height of Stalin's purges, they were arrested as Japanese spies. Some were shot, others sent to labour camp, few survived. Among them were members of Australian Mara Moustafine's family.

Driven by curiosity and armed with chutzpah, Mara Moustafine fronted up at the headquarters of the former KGB in post-Soviet Moscow and asked for help to discover what had happened. She got more than she bargained for. The family's secret police files, retrieved from archives at opposite ends of Russia, revealed the horror of the purges as well as startling secrets about their lives in turbulent years in China and the Soviet Union. What was fact? What was fiction?

Written with sensitivity and humour, 'Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files' skillfully weaves personal and political, past and present to give an insider's perspective on the life of ordinary people in extraordinary times.

"Secrets and Spies is a cry from the heart. Every page took me further and deeper into an experience listening to the horror stories of people who, though their souls had taken a beating and had survived Stalinism - the darkest of the dark years… Secrets and Spies:The Harbin Files is a protest - indignation at the inhumanity of one of this century's worst evils. A tribute to Moustafine and the past she has turned into a present" -Monica Attard

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Mara Moustafine was born in Harbin, China, into a family with Jewish Russian and Tartar roots and came to Sydney as a child in 1959.

Bilingual in Russian and English, Mara completed a Masters In International Relations at the Australian National University.

She has worked as a diplomat, intelligence analyst, ,journalist and senior business executive in Australia and Asia.

Mara Moustafine is currently working as the director of Amnesty International Australia.

PRAISE FOR SECRETS AND SPIES

'Secrets and Spies is a cry from the heart. Every page took me further and deeper into an experience I'd not had before, not even after four years in Russia, listening to the horror stories of people who, though their souls had taken a beating, had survived Stalinism-the darkest of the dark years. Mara Moustafine uses extraordinary descriptive power to bring back to life a family she has never met. She has transformed Stalin's victims into people you can almost touch and speak with, so detailed is her portrayal of their lives. The research is impeccable. The story compelling. Each page is a passionate tribute to a family defiant till death against a machine so insidious that its leader was mourned when he died. Secrets and Spies is a protest, an expression of indignation at the inhumanity of one of this century's worst evils. It is a tribute to Moustafine and the past she has turned into a present.'

Monica Attard, ABC journalist and author of
'Russia: Which Way Paradise' Transworld, 1997

'Secrets and Spies is an extraordinary book and contains an enormous series of moral lessons…I've read many family histories but none of them have the maturity and depth of this one. Often a family history is filled with personal anguish but there is a simplicity to it which makes it difficult to draw from it what is really happening in the wider world. Because of her background, Mara Moustafine is able to set the scene of a family drawn into the vortex of the most tragic events of the last century. She has the capacity for clinical, independent-minded research and broad moral judgement that enables her to do justice to the horror of her family's story.'

The Hon Kim Beazley MP,
former Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party

'[Moustafine's] gripping chronicle balances the personal impact of discovery with skilled geopolitical analysis…Secrets and Spies certainly delivers on its promise of unveiling lethal conspiracies. But it is the Darwinian struggle of ordinary people against overwhelming historical odds that grabs the attention.'

Felicity Bloch, Sydney Morning Herald