Evans, Diana

PERSONAL: Female. Education: University of Sussex, B.A.; University of East Anglia, M.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—London, England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, William Morrow & Co., 10 E. 53rd St., 7th Fl., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Writer. Has worked as a journalist and arts critic for Marie Claire, Evening Standard, Source, Independent, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Stage, Dance Theatre Journal, and Pride.

AWARDS, HONORS: Orange Award for New Writers, and Whitbread First Novel Award shortlist, both 2005, and Commonwealth Best First Book Award shortlist, 2006, all for 26A.

WRITINGS:

26A (novel), William Morrow (New York, NY), 2005.

Author of short fiction published in anthologies. Contributor of articles to newspapers and magazines.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel.

SIDELIGHTS: Diana Evans's novel 26A explores the bond peculiar to twins while also probing other human commonalties and differences. The story, which won Evans the United Kingdom's Orange Award for New Fiction, "was sparked by the death of someone close to me," she related in an interview for the Orange Prize Web site. (Other sources have identified the "someone close" as her twin.) Evans continued, "I had a weirdly comic and mystifying experience of grief and bereavement that had a lot to do with being a twin. The idea of being cut in half but also doubled by the experience stayed with me for a long time before I began writing the book, which eventually became a novel, essentially, about the relationship between twins."

The twins of Evans's novel are Georgia and Bessi Hunter, daughters of a white British father and a black Nigerian mother. They are also the reincarnation of two small animals killed by a motorist; Evans writes in the book, "Before they were born, Georgia and Bessi experienced a moment of indecision. They had been traveling through the undergrowth on a crescent moon night with no fixed destination and no notion of where they were." After their rebirth, they grow up in London with two other siblings, one younger, one older, and witness their father's excessive drinking and their mother's isolation and eccentricity. The twins find shelter from their parents' troubles and the rest of the world with each other in their attic bedroom, which they dub "26A." Initially, the twins are so close that they feel each other's physical pain. On a trip to Nigeria, however, Georgia suffers a sexual assault but does not tell Bessi about it. The assault and the subsequent secrecy begin to undermine the twins' special relationship and start Georgia on a path to mental illness.

Evans's ability to meditate on the nature of twins while at the same time making her story universal, along with the tale's fantastic aspects and her writing style, received praise from numerous reviewers. "Though Evans lost her twin in adulthood, the novel is beyond fictionalised autobiography in its echoing exploration of other 'couples' and doubles, whether spouses, lovers, or parents and children," observed Maya Jaggi in the London Guardian, adding that "a novel about being twins grows stealthily, movingly, into one about being human." Sue Wilson, writing in Scotland on Sunday, thought Evans had portrayed the "unique and mysterious bond" of the twins with "authenticity" that "is adroitly offset by Evans's magic-realist approach."

In the London Sunday Times Christina Koning noted, "The perceptiveness and humour with which Evans describes the pains of growing up is one of the best things about this book; another is the inventiveness of the language." That language also received compliments from Boston Herald critic Sarah Rodman, who remarked, "Evans' prose is like stones skipping on the water, hopping in neat rows and occasionally veering dramatically off to one side and back again." A Publishers Weekly reviewer deemed 26A "a funny, haunting, marvelous debut," while a Kirkus Reviews commentator described it as "a keen study of home, homelessness and the limits of symbiosis." "At its best," concluded New Statesman contributor Sheena Joughin, "this is a poetic, complex and lingering study of forces that can make life sometimes unliveable, wherever you come from, and wherever you live."

Evans told CA: "I began writing a journal and poetry in my teens. It came naturally to me, I knew I would write books one day, and once I became a journalist I eventually realised that I wanted, specifically, to write novels. I am inspired by lyrical writers such as Toni Morrison and Arundhati Roy, quirky writers such as Ali Smith, and powerfully sparse writers such as Jean Rhys and Raymond Carver. The most surprising thing I have learned as a novelist who started out as a journalist is that, unlike articles, a novel takes painstaking rewriting and a terrible first draft, it rarely flows off the pen fully formed. My writing process is chaotic, worrysome, overly complex, yearning for a simplicity that might not exist."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Evans, Diana, 26A, William Morrow (New York, NY), 2005.

PERIODICALS

Boston Herald, September 3, 2005, Sarah Rodman, "Author's Twin Tale '26A' Doubly Enticing."

Guardian (London, England), May 28, 2005, Maya Jaggi, "Two into One."

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2005, review of 26A, p. 701.

New Statesman, March 28, 2005, Sheena Joughin, "Secret Self."

Publishers Weekly, July 25, 2005, review of 26A, p. 41; August 8, 2005, Suzanne Mantell, profile of Diana Evans, p. 104.

Scotland on Sunday, March 27, 2005, Sue Wilson, "Double Trouble and Twin Peaks."

Sunday Times (London, England), April 9, 2005, Christina Koning, "Secrets from the Upper Room."

ONLINE

Orange Prize Web site, http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/ (October 20, 2005), interview with Diana Evans.