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 a US nuclear-missile testing range in the Marshall Islands. 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 and writes for English and French newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and L'Atelier du Roman. He is a trustee of English PEN, chair of English PEN’s Writers in Translation committee, and founding member of the Comité pour la Francophonie Littéraire, a group of writers dedicated to maintaining links between francophone writers and readers. His latest book is Semi-Invisible Man (Jonathan Cape), the biography of the writer and adventurer Norman Lewis. He is a recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française from the Académie Française, and from September 2009 is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Bristol University. He lives in south-west England with the artist Natasha Dukaya and their two children. To find out more you can click on the menu to read selected essays and interviews and to listen to the radio documentaries, and for 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 character 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 2006-08. Site designed and built by Laurie Harrison
Semi-Invisible Man published in paperback by Picador, 5 June
Chosen in "50 Best Summer Reads",
Independent, 20–26 June
read extracts
read reviews
recent journalism
In possession of all the facts, Prospect, May 2009
and click to download broadcasts including my radio essays on
Robert Louis Stevenson
F Scott Fitzgerald
Anton Chekhov
Alexander Pushkin
François Rabelais
and listen to the 20-part BBC Radio 3 series on the rise of the European novel The Romantic Road which features interviews with
Camilo José Cela
Javier Marías
Antonio Muńoz Molina
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
José Saramago
Marie Darrieusecq
Michel Déon
Michel Houellebecq
Michel Tournier
Marcel Möring
Harry Mulisch
Cees Nooteboom
Claudio Magris
Dacia Maraini
Antonio Tabucchi
Friederike Mayröcker
Ivan Klíma
Peter Pist'anek
Ludvík Vaculík
Pawel Huelle
Tadeusz Konwicki
Magda Szabó
Péter Esterházy
Andrei Bitov
Julia Latynina
Yuri Andrukhovych
Ólafur Gunnarsson
Einar Mar Gudmundsson
Per Olov Enquist
Sara Lidman
Torgny Lindgren
Henning Mankell
Jaan Kross
Dubravka Ugresic
Slavenka Drakulic
Ismail Kadare
Fatos Kongoli
and others
