Luke Johnson

Luke Johnson lectures in Creative Writing and Literary Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of Wollongong. He has written opinion pieces for The Age, ABC’s The Drum and New Matilda, and has had peer-reviewed research published both nationally and internationally. His fiction has appeared in such places as Overland, Island, Going Down Swinging, Heat, Mascara Literary Review and The Lifted Brow, and in 2014 he was shortlisted for the Josephine Ulrick Prize in Literature.

Luke Johnson reviews 'Down to the River' by S.J. Finn

May 2015, no. 371 • 28 April 2015

If it were up to Roy Ellis, the town-proud editor-in-chief of Dungower’s only newspaper, ‘paedophilia would be systematically bred out of humans’. That just about sums up the attitudes of his readers, who are disgusted to learn that there is a convicted child sex offender living among them in rural Victoria. Only when Ellis’s maverick reporter Joni Miller refuses to let go of the case whic ... (read more)

Luke Johnson reviews 'Westerly', Vol. 59, No. 2, edited by Delys Bird and Tony Hughes-d'Aeth

March 2015, no. 369 • 02 March 2015

‘A father is God to his son,’ declares the father in David Whish-Wilson’s story ‘The Cook’, just a split second before he is shot dead by his drug-dealing son. Thus begins this special edition of Westerly, which marks not only the magazine’s sixtieth year of publication but also the retirement of its two standing editors, Delys Bird and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth. Fortunately, those who liv ... (read more)