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| Interview with Diana Evans by Daneet Steffens DIANA Evans has been thinking a lot about Virginia Woolf lately. She’s just moved into her new home in a comfortably worn-in neighbourhood south of the Thames with a library, pool, park and several West Indian takeaways. It’s a pleasant area with a mellow, local atmosphere. Evans is delighted with it – and with her brand new study. Having just moved from a central London flat where she’s been working in cramped conditions in the corner of a room – ‘I felt like my writing was being squeezed into a corner and it was awful, really awful’ – Evans is now sitting on a large floor cushion in her very first writing room of her own. ‘I think I changed my mind about three times about the colour for the walls,’ she laughs. ‘But this is the first time I’ve ever had a room of my own to write in and it’s making me so happy, this room. I just can’t wait to be working in it.’ The bulk of the work, presumably, will be on the follow-up to her highly successful debut novel, 26a, which was released last year to widespread critical acclaim and went on to scoop up the British Book Awards’ Writer of the Year, as well as the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers. A lush, delightful, heartbreaking novel about a rough-and-tumble family living in tatty Neasden in the 80s and 90s, 26a’s emotional centre lies in twins Bessi and Georgia and their private, extra-dimensional world. Their English father and Nigerian mother make love, fight and raise four daughters, as Evans brings to vivid life slices of London suburbia, urban and rural Nigeria and an ensemble of strong, compelling characters. Charting the sisters’ development from childhood through adolescence into young adulthood, Evans chronicles chip butties and choc ices, boyfriends and lip gloss, sex and multiple piercings, cornrows and dreadlocks, Charles and Diana’s wedding and Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. Neasden – ‘a little hilly place next to a river and motorway with nodding trees and one stubby row of shops,’ – is a nearly-fairytale place where Gladstone’s ghost wanders, and the air is scented with chocolate. When the twins are nine and the family moves to Nigeria for three years, they find an even more surreal land bordering on a nightmare: ‘The garden was twice the size of the one in Neasden, and it was alive.... For the whole interview, read Issue 31 » Subscribe! Go to » Diana Evans's Method |
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For more on DIANA EVANS, go to www.randomhouse.ca/author/results.pperl?authorid=59892
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