Best life stories of 2023: Award-winning books to read over the hols

What’s on a life-story coach’s reading list for 2024

Welcome to my final and fave article of the year!

Keep reading for the Forever Young Autobiographies shortlist of life stories to win awards during the past 12 months.

This best life stories of 2023 list features writers from Australia, the United Kingdom and the USA.

Also look out for my reviews of each book on the website during 2024 …

My Dream Time: A memoir of tennis and teamwork by Ash Barty, HarperCollins

Australian Book Industry Awards 2023 Biography Book of the Year

It’s a tennis story. It’s a family story. A teamwork story. It’s the story of how I got to where and who I am today.

I’m only in my mid-twenties, and some might think that’s young to write a memoir. Who does that, right?

But for me and my team it’s always been important to reflect on every part of the journey, especially the end.

In that context, the timing is perfect to share my story, from the first time I picked up a racquet as a 5-year-old girl in Ipswich to the night I packed up my tennis bag at Melbourne Park after winning the 2022 Australian Open.

This book gives me a chance to look back at every moment of the 20 years in between, and to think carefully through the highs and lows, the work and the play, the smiles and the tears.

Coaching Calls Forever Young Autobiographies. Open hand outstretched over sparkling water.

The Boy from Boomerang Crescent by Eddie Betts, Simon and Schuster

Australian Book Industry Awards 2023 Social Impact Book of the Year

It’s a long, hard road from the Nullarbor to the MCG.

How does a self-described ‘skinny Aboriginal kid’ overcome a legacy of family tragedy to become an AFL legend? One thing’s for sure: it’s not easy.

But then, there’s always been something special about Eddie Betts.

Betts grew up in Port Lincoln and Kalgoorlie, in environments where the destructive legacies of colonialism – racism, police targeting of Aboriginal people, drug and alcohol misuse, family violence – were sadly normalised.

His childhood was defined by family closeness as well as family strife, plus a wonderful freedom that he and his cousins exploited to the full – for better and for worse.

The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world by Antony Loewenstein, Scribe Publications

2023 Walkley Awards Book Award

Best life stories of 2023: The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world by Antony Loewenstein, Scribe Publications

Bestselling journalist Antony Loewenstein uncovers the widespread commercialisation and brutal deployment globally of Israel’s occupation-enforcing technologies.

For more than 50 years, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an ‘enemy’ population, the Palestinians.

It’s here that they have perfected the architecture of control, using the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world.

The Palestine Laboratory shows in depth and for the first time how Israel has become a leader in developing spying technology and defence hardware that fuels some of the globe’s most brutal conflicts.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell, Faber

British Book Awards 2023 Book of the Year Non-Fiction Narrative

From a standout scholar, a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.

John Donne lived myriad lives. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.

He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral – and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language.

He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a high-born girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children and was often ill and in pain.

He was a man who suffered from black surges of sadness, yet expressed in his verse electric joy and love.

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage, Viking

2023 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Biography

A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today’s conservative political landscape.

We remember him as a bulldog – squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls – but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform.

He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine.

He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens.

He also believed that certain people – many of them communists – did not deserve to be included in that American project.

Final say: Best life stories of 2023

Find a holiday read with the Forever Young Autobiographies best life stories of 2023 book list.

Try stories about sportspeople, creatives, leaders and more.

Certainly you will find a read to intrigue you!

Also look out for my reviews of these books when I return from a break in the new year.

Happy holidays, writing and reading!

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