grew up on Australia's east coast and in the south London suburbs in the 1960s. In 1990 he left his job in London to island-hop across the Pacific Ocean by ship, small plane and boat, a journey that ended five months later at a US nuclear-missile test range at Kwajalein atoll. The book that resulted, Transit of Venus, has been described as “far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times”. His latest book is Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis (Jonathan Cape, Picador). He has also written and presented radio and television documentaries and writes for English and French newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and L'Atelier du Roman. He is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of the West of England and a trustee of English PEN, and a recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française from the Académie Française. He lives in south-west England with the artist Natasha Dikaya and their two children. To find out more, click on the menu to read selected essays and interviews and hear the radio documentaries, and to find reviews, photographs and notes on when, where and why things were written. _____________________________________ praise for Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis "not merely a well-behaved run-through of the life and the reviews, but an improvisation on the very idea of being Norman Lewis" Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books "a magnificent book... a triumph" Jason Webster, New Statesman "It is a wonderful book – almost as intelligent, stimulating and gripping as its subject" Sara Wheeler, Guardian "I doubt if anyone else could have rolled such a boulder to the top of this truly Sisyphean hill" Jan Morris, Financial Times "Norman Lewis is one of the great unsung literary heroes of the 20th century... a hugely enjoyable and engaging portrait" Philip Marsden, Sunday Times "a matchless biography... overwhelmingly, an exemplary life-story” Ian Thomson, Sunday Telegraph "Evans matched Lewis's curiosity and evocative writing with his own accomplished observation and penetration in this portrait of a writer who was not only a fascinating man but a good one" Rhoda Koenig, New Statesman Books of the Year "Semi-Invisible Man celebrates the achievement of one of the greatest English writers of the last century.... a vivid and just portrait of a very funny and difficult man whose books were recognised as classics by discerning readers" Patrick Marnham, Spectator Christmas Books "Julian Evans's vast and vastly enjoyable portrait of the great travel writer and novelist Norman Lewis" Kate Gunning, Guardian Readers' Books of the Year "An ideal introduction to Lewis as a charter of arcane, forbidding places with a growing conviction that the noblest of human societies are the simplest" Susan Elderkin, Financial Times Books of the Year read extracts more reviews the biographer's view |
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© Julian Evans 2006-11. Site designed and built by Laurie Harrison.
20 December Václav Havel: the compulsion of a dissident
28 October Unpublished typescript by F Scott Fitzgerald appears
18 June Lost art in search of a lost world
13 June I run, you run...
10 June Memories of meeting Patrick Leigh Fermor at Antibes
Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific
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