A loft apartment in Paris’ 10th arrondissement is filled with happily groaning bookshelves, chic comfortable furniture, decks, and a large wooden table. Australian writer Luke Davies, busy but cool and calm, is in jeans, a “No Regrets” tiger T-shirt and funky green trainers at his ‘puter surrounded by books, notepads and multi-coloured felt tip pens.
“Some friends offered me their place to look after for a few weeks and I thought ‘why not’,” he explains. “It’s a converted 19th-century sequins and button factory that served the Paris theatre district – I love it. And It’s a great little neighbourhood. Not really touristy; it’s busy and a bit chaotic and close to a lots of stuff.”
“Tea? Water?”
Davies, writer of cult novel Candy (and feature film starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish Candy), has a bulging and rapidly growing body of work published in five languages.
Among his awards and accolades are the The Age literary award for Totem Poem and The Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry for Interferons Psalms that was hailed by Peter Craven in The Australian as ‘’one of the most ambitious performances in modern Australian poetry that will command the world’s attention’’.
Luke Davies is ready for the red carpet at the academy awards, having been nominated for an OSCAR for adapted screenplay for Lion by director Garth Davies (Top of the Lake). Lion is based on the true story of a small Indian child who got lost on a train across India, lived on the streets then in an orphanage before being adopted and raised by a family in Tasmania. As a young man, needing to discover his routes, he used Google Earth to travel back to India to find his family. Lion is also nominated for best picture, Dev Patel for supporting actor, Nicole Kidman for supporting actress,Dustin O’Halloran & Hauschka for original score and Grieg Fraser for cinematography.
Read the full story with Luke back when he was working on the James Dean biopic in Issimo Magazine HERE. And watch the Oscars online HERE or if in Australia you can catch it on Channel 9. Lion is currently screening in cinemas around the globe.
