Diana Evans

Diana Omo Evans FRSL (born 1972) is a British novelist, journalist and critic. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her debut novel 26a won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People (2018) was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature.

As well as writing fiction, Evans contributes essays and literary criticism to the national press. She was honoured as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.

Background and education Evans is the daughter of a Nigerian mother and an English father. She was born and grew up in Neasden, north-west London, with her parents and five sisters, one of whom was her twin. She also spent part of her childhood in Lagos, Nigeria.

She completed a media studies degree at the University of Sussex. in the African dance troupe Mashango. and the literary journal Calabash.

Writing Her first novel, 26a, "a Bildungsroman that centres its storyline on the growing process of a pair of identical twins of Nigerian-British origin, Georgia and Bessi" growing up in Neasden, was published in 2005 to wide critical acclaim and has since been translated into 12 languages. It was shortlisted in the first novel category for both the Whitbread Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. Carol Birch, writing in The Independent, said of 26a that "Evans writes with tremendous verve and dash. Her ear for dialogue is superb, and she has wit and sharp perception" and though she has her criticisms, concludes that Evans "has produced a consistently readable book filled with likeable characters: a study of loss that has great heart and humour." According to Diriye Osman in the Huffington Post: "Here was a Bildungsroman of such daring and sustained elegance that it felt like a gorgeous dance of a novel. In many ways, it is apropos that this book which focused on the secret bond that exists between twins was followed in 2009 by the equally masterful The Wonder, a novel rooted in the world of dance."

Evans' second novel, The Wonder (2009), explores the world of dancing in the context of Caribbean immigration to the UK, London gentrification, and the bond between father and son.

Her third novel, Ordinary People (2018), is a portrait of family life for two black couples in their 30s in South London in a year bookended by the election of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson. Ordinary People was the winner of the South Bank Sky Arts Award and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Rathbones Folio Prize.

Her fourth novel, A House for Alice, was published in 2023, characterised as "the first memorialisation of Grenfell in fiction", it received Evans's second shortlisting for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Harper's Bazaar described the novel as 'a state-of-the-nation masterpiece'.

Also a journalist, Evans has contributed essays and literary criticism to Marie Claire, The Independent, The Observer, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, Time, The New York Review of Books and Harper's Bazaar.

She is an associate lecturer of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women in the UK. She is also a 2014–16 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the London College of Fashion and a 2016–17 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent.

Publications Novels

A House for Alice. London: Chatto & Windus, 2023. .

Short stories "Journey Home", in "The Beginning", in "Another Saturday Night (Sam Cooke, 1963)", in "Thunder", in "The Repeating House", Deep Night, Dark Night, Shakespeare's Globe, 2019 "Singular", Short Works, BBC Radio 4, 2019

Non-fiction

Awards 2005: Orange Award for New Writers, for 26a, Winner 2005: First Novel category, Whitbread Book Awards, for 26a, Shortlist 2006: Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book category, for 26a, Shortlist 2006: deciBel Writer of the Year award, British Book Awards, for 26a, Winner 2007: Arts Foundation Fellowship, for 26a, Shortlist 2007: International Dublin Literary Award, for 26a, Longlist 2017: Arts Council England Grant for the Arts Award 2019: Precious Lifestyle Award, for Ordinary People, Shortlist 2019: South Bank Sky Arts Award, for Ordinary People, Winner 2019: Prix Femina, for Ordinary People, Shortlist 2019: Grand prix des lectrices de Elle, for Ordinary People, Shortlist 2020: Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature