| "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 more reviews the biographer's view Julian Evans grew up on Australia's east coast and in the south London suburbs in the 1960s. In 1990 the contrasts of his childhood sent him back to the Pacific Ocean on a journey that ended at the US nuclear missile-testing range at Kwajalein atoll, and two years later he published Transit of Venus, which Norman Lewis described as “the best book about the South Seas I have ever read”. He has written and presented radio and television documentaries, among them BBC Radio 3’s 20-part series on the European novel, The Romantic Road (2000-2), and the BBC Four film José Saramago: A Life of Resistance (2002). He is an essayist and reviewer for English and French books pages and magazines. His latest book is the biography of the British writer and adventurer Norman Lewis, Semi-Invisible Man  (Jonathan Cape).He is a trustee of English PEN, chair of English PEN’s Writers in Translation committee, and a founding member of the Comité pour la Francophonie Littéraire, an international group of writers dedicated to maintaining the links between francophone writers and readers. He is a recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française from the Académie Française. He lives in south-west England and is married to the artist Natasha Dukaya. They have two children. To know more, click on books or journalism for reviews, photographs and personal notes on when, where and why things were written. You'll also find selected essays and pieces and be able to listen to the radio documentaries. |
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© Julian Evans 2006-08. Site designed and built by Laurie Harrison
UK paperback edition of Semi-Invisible Man to be published by Picador, June 2009
Semi-Invisible Man chosen in New Statesman "Books of the year", 17 November 2008
buy Semi-Invisible Man from an independent bookshop
read extracts from the book
also
Wisdom is a butterfly on a train in Azerbaijan, Independent, 12 September 2008
An aesthetic of fatality, Times Literary Supplement, 25 July 2008
and click Radio for broadcasts available on the audio player, whose subjects range from essays on the work of European and American writers to sketches of life in eastern Europe, and feature the widely praised 20-part BBC radio series on the European novel
The Romantic Road
BBC Radio 3
"Journeys start where you choose them to. This one started 400 years ago on the plain of La Mancha, when Cervantes sent Don Quixote out to crash through the screen of the world's appearances"
