Julian Evans grew up on Australia’s east coast and in south London. His first book, Transit of Venus, was described as “far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times”. He is also the author of Semi-Invisible Man, an acclaimed biography of the writer and adventurer Norman Lewis. Julian has written and presented radio and TV documentaries including BBC Radio 3’s 20-part series on the rise of the European novel, The Romantic Road, and the BBC Four film José Saramago: a Life of Resistance. He writes for English and French newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and L’Atelier du Roman.He is a recipient of the Académie Française Prize for the Advancement of French Literature. His latest book is Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War, a personal portrait of a city he has known for more than 25 years.

In 1994, Julian Evans discovered the city of Odesa by accident at the end of a ten-day boat journey down the Dnipro river from Kyiv to Crimea. He fell in love with the crumbling, romantic, piecrust-baroque boom town whose port had been a gateway for smugglers, immigrants, divas and poets for 200 years. Returning five years later, he fell in love with one of Odesa’s women, married her in a monastery opposite the railway station, and began a decades-long relationship with both of them.

Profoundly personal, Undefeatable tells the story of Evans’ involvement with the city over nearly thirty years, living in the formerly Jewish and criminal Moldavanka neighbourhood that Isaac Babel made famous in his Odesa Stories, and of his life with his Ukrainian family. But when war comes with Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, he discovers that his wife Natasha’s parents have stopped speaking to each other because they are on opposite sides of the conflict.

Tensions between family and friends become a microcosm of the city’s own continuously shifting, sometimes contradictory atmosphere, intensifying with Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. At this point, Evans decides to go back to live in the city under bombardment, and to the front line, ‘because the feeling you’re not where you belong, it bugs you’.

Timely, singular and dramatic, Undefeatable offers a lover’s portrait of a uniquely human, irrepressible city alongside a tour de force of the personal and political, combining empathy with compelling fresh insights into the history of Russia’s war against Ukraine and its cultural and emotional impacts.

Reviews for Undefeatable

“Undefeatable is an absolutely fascinating and absorbing memoir of one writer’s relationship with a city and its people. Powerful, cogent, humane and scarifying – Julian Evans has written a modern classic”

William Boyd

‘This is an important book, not just an eyewitness account of a country besieged, but a chronicle of the war, with helpful background both literary and political. Its great achievement is presenting its human face – resolute and heroic’

Paul Theroux

‘Wry, unsparing and lyrical; scattered with bright evocations of a country striving, against the odds, to be’

James Meek

‘Macabre, surreal, haunting, beautifully observed and darkly moving’

Rory Stewart

‘Julian Evans’ love letter to Odesa is as beguiling as the city itself. In lyrical prose he interweaves history and literature with an account of his three-decades long relationship with the city, mounting a passionate defence of Ukraine as it faces down Russia’s imperial aggression’

Lindsey Hilsum

‘Should be required reading. Undefeatable is simultaneously a work of literary art (it is beautifully written) and a superb introduction to what is happening in Ukraine now’

Carlo Gébler

‘A beautiful portrait of a city and a nation in a time of peril’

James Buchan

‘This is the account we’ve been starved of: an insight into Ukraine from an authoritative British writer who has skin in the country’s game. An outsider turned insider, his deep personal involvement compelled him to the front line of an unprovoked war without precedent in Europe for nearly 80 years. His vivid first-hand reportage shows how Odesa’s story is inseparable from Ukraine’s – and more than that, how it has become our story too.’

Nicholas Shakespeare

‘The idea that there’s a separate Ukrainian identity and culture is one that is denied by Vladimir Putin who maintains that the 40-odd million inhabitants he’s declared war on are simply deluded Russians. That lie is comprehensively nailed in [this] marvellous new book, which told me more about the values of contemporary Ukraine than anything else I’ve read’

Patrick Bishop

‘His evocative descriptions of Odesa and its people echo Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44’

Francis Dearnley, Sunday Telegraph

‘Evans is a wonderful writer and observer, a stylist as elegant and free-wheeling as the late Jonathan Raban. Each paragraph has a lapidary charm’

Luke Harding, Observer

Also by Julian Evans