Tonight Show Over Claude
"I was compelled to choose "Tonight Show Over Claude" for deeply personal reasons. It wasn't just that I found the work serene and soothing, melancholic and mysterious all at the same time. It was more than that: it was the double-take I did when I realised, with a jolt, that I had, in actual life, lived in this very apartment! I had lived there on two different occasions, in fact, over the course of a decade. The room with its glow of yellow light had been my little study. The apparent stillness of Spence's photograph belies the at times ferocious power of life lived on the edge of the world. I've really never experienced such a consistent sense of gratitude, and even wonder, in relation to one's digs. But since it's never good to cling, even to the sublime, I thought it appropriate to write a tiny fable of love and loss amid the wild salt spray."
Interpreter -
Luke Davies
Luke Davies is an internationally celebrated writer, the author of three novels (most recently God of Speed), four volumes of poetry and a co-writer, with Neil Armfield, of the feature film Candy.
Davies’ most recent poetry collection, Totem, won the 2005 South Australian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry, the Grace Leven Poetry Prize 2004, the Age’s Poetry Book of the Year Award and the overall Age Book of the Year Award, an unusual feat for a book of poetry. In 2004 Davies was also awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry.
Davies’ other novels are the cult best-seller Candy, Isabelle the Navigator and the just-released God of Speed. Candy was short listed for the 1998 NSW Premier's Awards and has been published in France, Spain, Germany, Israel, Greece, the UK and USA.