A “highly original” nonfiction by Melbourne historian Clare Wright, charting the creation of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions – a seminal moment in Australia’s history of land rights – has won book of the year at the NSW literary awards.

The Petitions were landmark documents presented by Yolŋu elders to the Australian parliament in 1963 on painted bark frames, which sought government intervention after a portion of Arnhem Land Reserve was licensed to a French mining company. Though it didn’t halt mining on the land, the petitions led to the first land rights legislation in Australia, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

Written more like a novel than a historical nonfiction, Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions treats its subjects as characters, bringing the reader along with their political aspirations and acts of resilience, without the sense of inevitability that usually accompanies a work of history.

At a ceremony at the NSW state library on Monday night, Näku Dhäruk won the $10,000 top prize along with the $40,000 Douglas Stewart prize for nonfiction. Judges called the book “a work of national significance”, saying the personal accounts included in the narrative felt “vividly alive” with “an extraordinary depth of research and sophisticated scholarship”.

“It is a book that should be read by all Australians,” judges said.

Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions is the third in Wright’s “democracy trilogy” about three defining moments in Australia’s political history, including the 2014 Stella prize-winning Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, which shares the stories of women who united during the 1850s Eureka Stockade, and You Daughters of Freedom, about white Australian women winning the right to vote.

Wright, who was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2020 for her outstanding “service to literature, and to historical research”, has already picked up multiple awards for Näku Dhäruk, including the 2025 Australian Political book of the year. Speaking to Guardian Australia before she knew she had won the main prize at the NSW literary awards, the author joked that her book’s cover design is now “more stickers than cover”. “If it was a bottle of wine, you would be buying a case,” she said, laughing.

Wright spent a decade writing Näku Dhäruk. She calls the 640-page work “collaborative”, speaking of her time living and working with the Yirrkala community.

“The Yolŋu people wanted me to tell it because they wanted Australia to know their story,” she said. “Readers who have spent time in north-east Arnhem Land with Yolŋu people tell me that [reading the book] felt like going home, it felt like being … in that very special remarkable part of the world.”

The La Trobe University professor is considered a culturally adopted member of the Yunupiŋu family, she said; it was 1978 Australian of the Year Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu who gave Wright the language title of the book in 2020. Näku means “bark” and Dhäruk means “the word” or “message” in Yolŋu matha (tongue).

“There was a lot of nervousness as to whether the Australian public would be able to cope with a book that had a language title,” Wright said. The fact that it’s had its fourth print in just over a year is proof “there is a hunger and a desire to read stories that enrich our sense of the nation’s past”.

Other winners on Monday night included Moreno Giovannoni, who won the $40,000 Christina Stead prize for fiction for The Immigrants – “an absolute gem of a novel,” said the judges, which blends fiction and family memoir.

The Multicultural NSW award went to playwright S Shakthidharan for Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath, a “lyrical” book that “expands the genre of memoir”, the judges said.

In the children’s book categories, Gone by Michel Streich won the Patricia Wrightson prize for children’s literature and Marly Wells and Linda Wells shared the Ethel Turner prize for young people’s literature for Desert Tracks.

The Black Woman of Gippsland by Andrea James took home the Nick Enright prize for playwriting, and the Betty Roland prize for scriptwriting went to Shaun Grant for episode four of the drama miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The Kenneth Slessor prize for poetry was awarded to Jill Jones for How to Emerge, which judges said was “a mastery of catalogue and repetition”.

The Indigenous Writers’ prize went to Natalie Harkin for Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea, praised for covering “a brutal chapter in our history”, about First Nations women being used as indentured servants in South Australia.

Micaela Sahhar won the UTS Glenda Adams award for new writing for a “deeply moving, confronting and life-affirming book”, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. And the University of Sydney’s people’s choice award went to Emily Maguire for the author’s “rapturous” prose in historical novel Rapture.