The amazing journey to the Oscars for Lion screenwriter Luke Davies

An Academy Award nomination for writing the hit Australian film Lion this week. A new film called Beautiful Boy, an intense addiction drama produced by Brad Pitt and starring Steve Carell, that starts shooting in six weeks. And a television adaptation of Catch 22 with Animal Kingdom director David Michod for the producers of True Detective.

"I'm in top spirits," Davies, 54, says cheerfully from Los Angeles.

But that has not always been true. And the screenwriter, novelist and poet can precisely date the turnaround in his life – January 2, 1990.

"I recently celebrated my 27th 'birthday' clean," he says. "That's exactly half my life coming through the other side and being drug-free."

After finishing university, Davies was a 22-year-old cadet journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald when his life began to fall apart.

"My reign at the Herald was very ignominious and lasted less than eight weeks from memory," he says. "It's a pretty hard thing to do to get fired as a cadet but there were too many absences because my life was in disarray. I was fast-tracking it towards becoming a heroin addict."

Six wild and desperate years of drug use followed until Davies realised he had to get clean.

"The single most important life-changing thing that I ever did was on January 2, 1990, when I somehow dragged myself into a detox and changed my life," he says.

"What would have happened to my life otherwise? There's a very good chance I'd be dead or institutionalised or just extremely low functioning and unhappy, maybe on the pension and methadone and spending all day in the pub. Most likely dead.

"I had to learn a new way of living that had to involve not self-medicating with drugs for whatever reasons to numb my emotions."

In his clean life, Davies established himself as a blazingly intense writer of novels and poems. He won multiple awards, chronicled his drug years in the 1998 novel Candy then adapted it for Neil Armfield's 2006 film of the same name starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish.

But his struggles were not over. Almost a decade ago, Davies decided to base himself in Los Angeles.

"A six-year relationship broke up in Sydney and the pain and the bewilderment was really devastating," he says. "My life fell apart. [I thought] if I'm going to be in pain, it doesn't matter where I am so I might as well stay in LA and see what I might be able to get going off the back of Candy.

"But it was really, really tough for the first five years – extreme poverty, going into debt in the sense of living off maxed-out credit cards, anxiety about how I was going to pay next month's rent and a complete inability to get an agent, even a meeting.

"It was tough but I don't mind toughness. I stuck to my guns. I didn't exactly know what I was going to be doing and I was often bewildered but I was just like 'keep doing it, see what happens, believe that something is going to happen'."

The turning points were firstly landing the job of writing the 2015 movie Life, about the friendship between James Dean and a Life magazine photographer, then having his book Interferon Psalms win the 2012 Prime Minister's Literary Award for poetry, worth $80,000.

"That was the most enormous godsend," Davies says. "There was this one moment when I was completely debt free, with zero on the credit cards, and enough money to live on for a good year or more."

After being commissioned to write the screenplay for Lion, Davies travelled around India with Saroo Brierley, whose story about tracking down his birth mother using Google Earth is dramatised in the film, visiting the real life locations. Now the film is screening, he has been surprised by how warmly it has been received.

In a record year for Australian film with 14 nominations, Lion has six nods including best picture, Nicole Kidman for supporting actress, Dev Patel for supporting actor plus adapted screenplay, cinematography and original score.

"Way back in the beginning, there was that moment like 'this is an amazing story. I'm so glad that I got this job'," Davies says. "We were all excited and just said 'let's just try and make a really good film'.

"That's the limit of what you're aiming for – and that's a very smart and satisfying limit. This other stuff feels extraordinary. A beautiful sense of validation."

Davies believes his time as an addict has helped him bring emotional depths to his writing.

"I went from the compassionless state of being a drug addict, where you only care about yourself and your needs, to learning to experience the world outside myself with more compassion," he says. "Somewhere in that compassion, you become interested in others and that's where the stories lie – in your connection with other people's joys and sufferings."

Davies now recognises, looking back, that his journey to the Oscars has been extraordinary. "It's very much pinch-yourself material on a daily basis," he says. "You live your life one step at a time and all these things happen."