Cirrus@Austlit

Louis Nowra was born in Melbourne and studied at La Trobe University without taking a degree. Nowra worked at several jobs and lived an itinerant lifestyle until the mid-1970s when his plays began to attract attention. Nowra is best known for the many plays that he has written since that time, but he has also written film scripts (including adaptations of his own work), plays for radio and television, novels and autobiography. Nowra has held administrative positions in several theatre companies, directed a number of productions and translated several plays for the Australian stage. In collaboration with his first wife, Sarah de Jong, he has written the music for his plays and other productions. Nowra's work has won a number of awards and Nowra has been a writer-in-residence and lecturer at The University of Queensland.

Nowra's plays exhibit his interest in black comedy and gothic themes that explore fundamental issues in human individuality. Several of his plays can be seen as explorations of the mind and its relationship with language, but Nowra has also extended that to explore the effects of imperialism and oppression. In the early 1990s several of his plays employed autobiographical elements that have been further explored in his autobiography, The Twelfth of Never (2000). While many of his plays are set outside Australia, the themes he explores can be easily applied to the Australian condition. This is demonstrated in his widely admired treatment of Aboriginal issues in plays like Radiance and Crow, which extend many of the themes of his earlier plays.

Nowra also wrote the non-fiction work The Cheated (1979), consisting of a series of news items about bizarre incidents, and contributed to Edge of the Earth : Stories and Images from the Antipodes (1990) which traces the development of New Zealand film-maker Vincent Ward. In 2007, Pluto Press published his Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children as part of the Australia NOW series. The work was controversial and prompted a response from authors and lawyers Larissa Behrendt and Nicole Watson ('A Response to Louis Nowra', Alternative Law Journal 33.1 (March 2008): 45-47).

Nowra has been involved in script-writing since the 1980s, when he wrote television movies including Displaced Persons, Hunger, and The Lizard King. Among those films that are better known internationally are Map of the Human Heart (for which he was script-writer) and K-19 : The Widowmaker (for which he contrinbuted the story). He has also adapted his own plays to the screen, including Radiance and Cosi.

While better known as a playwright, Nowra has also published novels intermittently since the 1970s, beginning with The Misery of Beauty : The Loves of Frogman. His most recent novels have been young-adult works: wilderness novel Into That Forest and war story Prince of Afghanistan.

Among Nowra's many awards are the Patrick White Award (2013) and the Canada-Australia Literary Award (1993), as well as AWGIE Awards for fiction and documentary, a Logie Award, AFI Awards for both documentary and adapted screenplay, a Green Room Award, and the Prix Italia Drama Award. He has been shortlisted for many more.

Louis Nowra was awarded an honorary doctorate by Griffith University on 26 March 1996.