P031 Love and Death - Jeremy Page

Jeremy Page in conversation with Carole Harmon


Aired: April 4 - 17, 2022

Jeremy Page is a writer, editor, playwright and translator. He was Director of the Centre for Language Studies at the University of Sussex.

Carole Harmon comments:

I'm struck by the fellowship of writers who pursue similar means of reaching readers and listeners. Jeremy is founding editor of the long running literary journal, Frogmore Papers, and a member of Needlewriters, a co-operative which showcases writers from Sussex and Kent in England. My co-producer, Ingrid Rose, studied at the University of Sussex. Small world.

Dance Me To The End Of Love is the story Jeremy has chosen to read for Writers Radio listeners. The famous Leonard Cohen song is like a recurring minor character in a story which traces love and loss, illness, death, and renewal in the relationship of two friends and their beloveds.

Jeremy's writing is influenced by the writing of philosopher and journalist Albert Camus, one of the Twentieth Century's great writers. His 1947 novel La Peste foreshadowed the 1949-53 polio epidemic and our own Covid-19 Pandemic.

This story has another resonance with the time we are living in. Leonard Cohen's inspiration in writing Dance Me To the End Of Love; "arose from a photograph that I saw when I was a child, of some people in striped pyjamas prison uniforms with violins playing beside a smoke stack and the smoke was made out of gypsies and children, and this song arose out of that photograph." Leonard Cohen

The program closes with Jeremy reading two poems from his latest collection, The Naming and The Return.

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