Louis Nowra is an author, screenwriter and playwright. His books include Ice and The Twelfth of Never, and he is co-winner of the 2009 NSW Premier’s Script Writing Award for First Australians.
Articles by this author
Catherine Titasey’s ‘My Island Homicide’
A surprising number of Australians don’t realise that the Torres Strait Islands are part of Australia. There are almost 300 of them stretching north of Cape York. Their...
Adventures in Katterland
The Heart and Mind of Bob Katter
One steamy Saturday morning in mid March, Bob Katter, dressed in jeans, a pale shirt and his trademark cream-coloured Akubra Arena, was pacing up and down outside a home in...
John Bell’s ‘On Shakespeare’
Bowing to the bard
Watching him rehearse was one of the most fascinating experiences I’ve had in the theatre. In 1980 John Bell was playing the protagonist in Cyrano de Bergerac and I was assistant...
Wim Wenders’ ‘Pina’ and Alain Corneau’s ‘Love Crime’
After life
It was a hot night in Adelaide in 1982 and I was sitting in a ramshackle town hall about to watch a dance piece, Kontakthof, created by a German choreographer I had barely heard...
Germaine Greer and ‘The Female Eunuch’
The better self?
The image has seared itself into my memory. Taken about five years ago, it is a newspaper photograph of Germaine Greer appearing on the UK’s Celebrity Big Brother. Snapped on the...
On Tony Abbott
The whirling dervish
A couple of days after Tony Abbott became leader of the Opposition, I found myself in an emergency ward waiting for an operation. It was a Saturday and, given that St Vincent’s is...
Nowhere near Hollywood
There is a special sort of loneliness about sitting in a cinema on your own. Over the past year, I have frequently found myself watching an Australian movie as the sole member of...
‘Manhood for Amateurs’ by Michael Chabon
There’s something of the eternal kid about Michael Chabon. Whereas other serious writers have outgrown Marvel comics, Star Trek and the rock songs of their youth, Chabon’s...
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‘Barley Patch’ by Gerald Murnane
There are times at the end of an author’s career when a book review is almost a redundant exercise. This holds equally true for bestselling writers – like Bryce Courtenay – or...
Patrick French’s ‘The World Is What It Is’
More than picong
Whenever I read Proust's magnificent In Search of Lost Time I have to try hard to forget that the author liked to masturbate while watching rats being tortured to death. There are...
