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This article relates to 26a
Diana Evans
is a graduate of the University
of East Anglia's Creative
Writing MA, and lives in
London. She has published short
fiction in a number of
anthologies, has worked as a
journalist and arts critic for
several magazines in the United
Kingdom, and writes regularly
for the Independent and
Stage. She recently won
the 2005 Orange Prize for New
Writers for 26a (The
Orange Prize for Fiction,
supported by the Arts Council
England, has been awarded
annually for 10 years but last year was the first year for the Orange Award for New
Writers).
Diana Evans was prompted to write her first novel following the suicide of
her own twin sister. She says, "It stopped me in my tracks ... I wasn't
really satisfied with what I was doing. It threw me
and made me think that life is
too short." She sees
26a as a tribute to the
world of twins, in an interview
in 3ammagazine.com she says
being a twin "is a very special,
magical relationship and it's
fascinating, even to me ... most
people build armor to protect
themselves from other people but
when you're a twin, everything's
stripped down. You know each
other so intimately and you
don't have that armor."
With regard to suicide, she says
that while most see it in a
negative way, she has learned
that there is a more positive
and magical side, she says,
"It's about a person freeing
themselves. It is actually a
very courageous thing to do. To
leave can be braver than to just
stay here and struggle on, never
knowing whether you'll ever be
happy." For obvious
reasons, writing 26a was
especially hard for her - she
felt a burning passion to
complete it and felt a great
sense of relief when it was
done, but not in a cathartic
sense. She put her
life on hold while writing it,
and has promised herself that
she will be less intense with
the next book, which she is
writing in bursts while her baby
daughter sleeps.
Talking about her second novel,
currently in progress, Diana
says "I'm at that agonizing,
chaotic conceptual stage where
the idea is much, much bigger
than I thought it was and I
realize terrifying things, such
as the small matter of having to
research the entire history of
the entire world, for instance.
Im also casually working on a
short story about a little girl
who gets sucked into a hoover
(vacuum cleaner)".
Amongst her favorite books she
includes Jeffrey Eugenides'
Middlesex; Jean Rhys's
After Leaving Mr Mackenzie;
Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast,
Stardust by Neil Gaiman;
short story collections by
Raymond Carver, Jackie Kay,
Anton Chekhov and Ali Smith; and
the poems of Rita Dove and Mary
Oliver; and in particular The
God of Small Things by
Arundhati Roy.
This "beyond the book article" relates to 26a. It originally ran in November 2005 and has been updated for the September 2006 paperback edition. Go to magazine.
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