Howard Alan Willis (born 15 November 1948), is an Australian essayist, novelist, critic and editor.

The son of a Lands Department inspector in Victoria, Willis was born at Colac and grew up at Apollo Bay, Kyneton and Ballarat.

As a student at La Trobe University in the late 1960s, Willis was part of a group (which also included Philippe Mora, Peter Beilby, Rod Bishop and Demos Krouskos), that wrote and produced the first issue of Cinema Papers (October 1967).

[22] As a non-fiction editor, Willis prepared for publication (including the title) The Last of the Last (2009), the autobiography of Claude Choules, the last combat veteran of World War I.

[35] In 2011, he wrote an introductory essay to a reprinted edition of Thermo-Electrical Cooking Made Easy,[36][37] by Nora Curle-Smith,[38] first published in Kalgoorlie in 1907,[39] and claimed to be the world’s first cookbook for an electric stove.

In 2006, Willis was diagnosed with hepatitis C, which he believes was contracted by either a blood transfusion or a catheter in a Perth hospital in the mid-1980s.

[40] A second novel, Playing with Mischief, set in rural Victoria (Ballarat and Kyneton) in the early 1960s, was self-published at the end of July 2021.