Steven Conte trumped literary heavyweights David Malouf and Tom Keneally to win the $100,000 tax-free prize for his novel, The Zookeeper's War.

Adelaide historian Philip Jones won the non-fiction award, also $100,000 tax-free, for Ochre and Rust, from a field that included big-name contenders Clive James and Germaine Greer.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced the awards at Parliament House yesterday, saying literature was ''part of the sinews and soul'' of the nation.

Conte, 42, who had regarded himself as ''a rank outsider'', said he was ''astonished and a little daunted'' by the award for the novel which was 10 years in the writing, much of the first draft completed in Braidwood.

Born in Sydney, Conte grew up in Guyra in rural NSW and came to Canberra in 1987 when he was 20 after hitchhiking 3000km around Europe. He lived 10 years in Canberra and a year in Braidwood, studying professional writing at the University of Canberra and Australian literature at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

He worked in public affairs at Centrelink and as a barman, life model, taxi driver and book reviewer to support his writing.

Now living in Melbourne, and with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne, Conte is working ''hard and briskly'' on his second novel.

The Zookeeper's War (Fourth Estate) tells the story of an Australian woman, married to the director of the Berlin Zoo, as the city collapses under Allied bombing in the closing days of World War II.

Conte said its inspiration came from the experience of living in Berlin for several months in 1986 as an unemployed 20-year-old.

''I spent a lot of time wandering the streets, often alongside the Wall, absorbing an atmosphere of melancholy and menace that I later transferred to the novel's World War II setting,'' he said.

While the book was short-listed for a regional prize as best first book in the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, it has had a modest profile.

The judges headed by Professor Peter Pierce, with author John Marsden and broadcaster Margaret Throsby recommended the book for ''its command of engrossing plot and vivid historical setting, for the ethical seriousness that informs its every incident and entanglement, [and] for the freshness and vivacity of a new voice in Australian fiction''.

The non-fiction winner, Philip Jones, is a senior researcher at the South Australian Museum and has undertaken fieldwork with Aboriginal communities in southern and central Australia.

Ochre and Rust (Wakefield Press) traces the stories of artefacts on museum shelves, relating them to events in Australia's frontier history.

Dr Jones said a chance discovery of ''a small crumpled handwritten note in an Aboriginal net bag in a museum storeroom'' and the associated chain of discovery and deduction had led him to write the book.