Louis Nowra

Louis Nowra (born 12 December 1950) is one of Australia's most acclaimed and prolific writers, playwrights, screenwriters and librettists. Nowra is famous for such plays as Così, Byzantine Flowers, Summer of the Aliens, Radiance, and The Golden Age. He recently completed the The Boyce Trilogy for Griffin Theatre Company, consisting of The Woman with Dog's Eyes, The Marvellous Boy and The Emperor of Sydney (Currency, Australia, 2007).

He was born as Mark Doyle on 12 December 1950, in Melbourne, Australia. He changed his name to Louis Nowra in the early 1970s. He studied at Melbourne's La Trobe University without earning a degree. In his memoir The Twelfth of Never Nowra claimed that he left the course due to a conflict with his professor on Patrick White's The Tree of Man. He worked in several jobs and lived an itinerant lifestyle until the mid-1970s when his plays began to attract attention.

His non-fiction works include The Cheated (Angus & Robertson, Australia, 1979) and Warne's World (Duffy & Snellgrove, Australia, 2002). He has also written four novels: The Misery of Beauty (Angus & Robertson, Australia, 1976), Palu (Picador, Australia, 1987), Red Nights (Picador, Australia, 1997), Abaza (Picador, Australia, 2001) and two memoirs, The Twelfth of Never (Picador, Australia, 1999) and Shooting the Moon (Picador, Australia, 2004). In March 2007, he published a controversial book on violence in Aboriginal communities, Bad Dreaming (Pluto Press, Australia 2007).

Other credits include screenwriter for Map of the Human Heart (1992), The Matchmaker (1997), Cosi (1997), K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), Heaven's Burning, Twisted Tales: Directly From My Heart to You (1996), and Black and White (2002).

His radio plays include Albert Names Edward, The Song Room and The Widows.

Nowra has been studied extensively in Veronica Kelly's work The Theatre of Louis Nowra.

He currently resides in Sydney, Australia with his wife, author Mandy Sayer.

1949