Lew Collins

Lew Collins, born in Perth, Western Australia, graduated with a BA in English Literature from the University of Western Australia in 1976. Going on to filmmaking studies at Curtin University, where he earned Young Filmmaker of the Year, he was offered a filmmaking post in Hong Kong, where he stayed for six years, before returning to Sydney to make films for the multicultural station, SBS-TV. 

In the late eighties he turned to writing novels, leaving Australia to live and work in New York, Rome, London and France. He published his debut novel in 2008, Uncorrected Proof (Elephant Ears Press), a postmodern satire of writing and publishing, structured on Homer's Iliad, that the Crikey literary blog LiteraryMinded called the most original book its reviewer read that year. The novel was reissued in hardcover in 2023.

His second novel, Out of Competition (JEF Books, October 2024, 412 pages), won the 2023 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel. Set at a fictional film festival on the French Riviera where everything that can go wrong does, it follows a Tolstoyan sized raft of characters in a comic reversal of War and Peace, opening with a bankrupt Hollywood producer being grabbed off a street by democracy demonstrators, as a Russian impresario's show shark falls from a helicopter into the bay and swallows a boat driver. 

Collins lives and writes in the south of France and keeps a blog at swimanog.com.