Some interesting news: Melbourne-based actor and director Leisa Shelton talked me into agreeing to a stage adaptation of my last novel My Hundred Lovers and we have just learned that the project has got the green light.

Over the years several of my novels have been optioned for film, and none of them have made it to a cinema. I was most excited by the idea of Jane Campion’s film company optioning Hungry Ghosts – I thought Campion’s creative eye might be exactly the right one to translate that particular book into a film. Other options on other books included the late great Joan Lindsay of Picnic at Hanging Rock fame who wanted to do my first novel Messages From Chaos – way back in 1988 (I’ve been in this business a long time) – and the people who did that film about a pig, Babe, for the 1996 novel A Big Life. All came to nought.

This time the wonderful Australia Council will fund Leisa’s project. Leisa talked me into agreeing to the idea at all by directing me to her work with the brilliant Canadian poet, Anne Carson, whose work Leisa has adapted for the stage, in Canadian, Australian and European productions. Based on Carson’s collection of short works called Men in the off hours, Shelton and her company Fragment 31 turned Irony is not Enough-Essay on my life as Catherine Denueve into a brilliant conceptual piece of theatre.

I must admit when Leisa first approached me I was inclined to scoff. How could she possibly translate a novel about a body’s intimate physical sensations into a visible artistic form? Books and their images are located in the head, in private space, but a few long talks with Leisa convinced me that the images in the book might be creatively transformed to images on a public stage. Leisa is brilliant – Anne Carson trusted her – and she seems to possess the same strange, visionary dream that allows a writer to write. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with.

As they say in the trade, watch this space….