Lew Collins

Lew Collins is an Australian-born filmmaker turned novelist who came to fiction late, after a career in documentary film and a decade of living between cities. Born in Western Australia, he trained as a filmmaker and went professional in Hong Kong in 1979, joining Radio Television Hong Kong as a director-producer in its English-language documentary unit and working there for roughly six years before returning to Sydney. His documentary work in Asia and Australia twice took him into China before its modernisation.

He turned to novels after stops in New York, Rome, London, and Cannes, and published his debut in 2008 under the deliberately gender-ambiguous pen name Louisiana Alba. Uncorrected Proof (Elephant Ears Press, 2008) is 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. A second edition was reissued in 2023 under his own name, Lew Collins.

His second novel, Out of Competition (JEF Books, October 2024, 407 pages), won the 2023 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel from the Journal of Experimental Fiction. Set at a fictional film festival on the French Riviera, it follows a failing Hollywood producer through democracy demonstrators, a kidnapping, and a Russian impresario's shark dropped from a helicopter into the bay. It is his first and so far only book on the JEF list.

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

Start with Out of Competition, the Patchen-winning novel and his JEF debut.