Diana Evans
Writing Coach
Diana Evans is the award-winning, bestselling author of four novels and a collection of non-fiction. Her prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book awards, and she was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. She has also been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, twice for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Ordinary People.
Diana Evans is the award-winning, bestselling author of four novels and a collection of non-fiction. Her prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book Awards, and she was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. She has also been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, twice for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Ordinary People.
Diana began her writing career as a journalist and poet, before taking the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her debut novel, 26a, won the Orange Award for New Writers and the British Book Awards deciBel Writer of the Year prize. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Best First Book Award and the Times/South Bank Show Breakthrough Award, 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.’
Diana’s third novel, Ordinary People, was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It 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, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for which she was again shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
A former dancer, Diana has written extensively on dance, music, literature and culture in Vogue, Granta, the Guardian, TIME and elsewhere, a selection of which features in her non-fiction collection I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
‘The most useful thing that I have learnt over years of writing is that the magic only comes when we face the page with humility and a readiness to fail.’