Louis Nowra – January 8 2017

Louis is a writer, playwright, screenwriter, librettist and cultural commentator. After abandoning a university degree in Melbourne, Louis drove as far away from his abusive parents as possible, and, having already decided to abandon his birth name, Mark Doyle, chose the name ‘Nowra’ when his car broke down there. Louis has been resident playwright of the Sydney Theatre Company and Associate Director at Adelaide’s Lighthouse Theatre and, together with his third wife, author Mandy Sayer, was named joint holder of the 2014 Copyright Agency Non-Fiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Technology, Sydney. Louis’ most significant plays are Così, a semi-autobiographical play set in a mental institution, and Radiance, both of which have been turned into films, Byzantine Flowers, Summer of the Aliens, The Golden Age, and Spellbound, in which he used his wife at the time, composer Sarah de Jong’s father’s suicide as material. His radio plays include Albert Names Edward, The Song Room, The Widows and The Divine Hammer. Louis’ novels include The Misery of Beauty, Palu, Red Nights, Abaza and Ice. He has also published a controversial book on violence in Aboriginal communities, Bad Dreaming.

The Twelfth of Never
Picador, 1999; ISBN 9780330361873
Louis never understood why, as a child, his birthday was not celebrated. Only later was he to discover that exactly five years before his birth, his mother killed her father, a Gallipoli war veteran. In this funny, razor’s-edge memoir, Louis Nowra looks back at a fractured family: a beautiful and demanding mother, whose standards could and would never be met by her children or her husbands; a father in love with long-distance; a mad grandmother; a hideous head accident; and a childhood filled with strangeness and obsessions: with a one-armed Dutch girl, flying saucers and aliens, an Italian movie starlet, and the stylish, black American political leader, Adam Clayton-Powell. The Twelfth of Never is a moving and wonderfully original evocation of an unconventional boyhood, of growing up believing that aliens might just walk among us, and of the realisation that to be normal is harder than you think. Louis’ sequel memoir is Shooting the Moon.

Kings Cross
NewSouth Publishing, 2013; ISBN 9781742233260
Louis Nowra burrows beneath the sensationalist Underbelly ‘sex and sin’ narrative, revealing stories and a cast of characters – some household names, others little-known – that not even a writer could conjure up. Kings Cross is a no-holds barred place, where backpackers, prostitutes, strippers, chefs, mad men, poets, beggars, booksellers, doctors, gangsters, sailors, musicians, drug traffickers, eccentrics, judges and artists live side by side. Part flaneur, part historian and part eyewitness, Louis Nowra is the best possible guide to a place both real, and a state of mind.