Luke Davies


Luke Davies is an Australian writer of poetry, novels and screenplays. His best known works are and the screenplay for the film Lion, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Davies also co-wrote the screenplay for the film News of the World.

Life and career

Davies studied Arts at the University of Sydney.
His first poetry collection Four Plots for Magnets was published in 1982 by S. K. Kelen at Glandular Press. Long out of print, it was republished by Pitt Street Poetry in 2013. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film Candy with director Neil Armfield, based on his 1997 novel . The film stars Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish as struggling heroin addicts. Davies himself overcame heroin addiction in 1990.
Davies' other works include the novels Isabelle the Navigator and God of Speed, and several volumes of poetry – Four Plots for Magnets, Absolute Event Horizon, Running With Light, Totem and Interferon Psalms – as well as the chatbooks The Entire History of Architecture and other love poems and The Feral Aphorisms. Davies wrote the screenplays for Air, Life, Lion, and the Felix van Groeningen drama Beautiful Boy. He is attached to write the Tom Hanks helmed adaptation of Paulette Jiles' News of the World.
Davies is also a film critic for The Monthly, and occasional book reviewer and essayist for other magazines and newspapers.
In 2010 Davies won the John Curtin Prize for Journalism, at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, for his essay The Penalty Is Death, about the lives inside prison of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, two drug runners on Bali's death row.
His children's book, Magpie, was published by ABC Books in 2010.
In May 2017 the ABC program Australian Story profiled Davies' life in a two-part episode.

Awards and nominations