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Diana Evans

Diana Evans was born and brought up in London. Her bestselling debut novel, 26a, won the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers and the British Book Awards deciBel Writer of the Year prize. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough awards, and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Wonder, was also published to critical acclaim, described by The Times as ‘the most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes‘. Evans was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction for her third novel, Ordinary People, which was a New Yorker, New Statesman and Financial Times book of the year, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. Her fourth novel, A House for Alice, is the highly acclaimed follow-up, for which she was again shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Evans is a former dancer, and her journalism, criticism and essays appear in among others Time Magazine, Vogue, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Review of Books and Harper’s Bazaar. She has been an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. www.diana-evans.com


“For home had a way of shifting, of changing shape and temperature. Home was homeless. It could exist anywhere, because its only substance was familiarity. If it was broken by long journeys or tornadoes it emerged again, reinvented itself with new decor, new idiosyncrasies of morning, noon and dusk, and old routines.”
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“I needed somewhere that wasn't bad. I wanted to be light and happy like you, and I wanted never for you to see the dark. I was scared I would infect you with terrible feelings and pictures in my head of walking out in front of the traffic and - No. That's not for you, see? Not for you to hear. I needed you to be my sunlight, Bessi,' and here George paused and her words became very small, 'I lost mine, I lost it.”
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“Georgia tutted under her breath. 'I'm loud sometimes,' she said, thinking So bloody what if I'm quiet - what's the thing about it?”
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“Georgia had felt the colours and the rain, but she would not miss here. And there was something lost. The now-ness of things. It was not pretty.”
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