Diana Evans was born and brought up in London and in Lagos, Nigeria. She began her writing career as a journalist and poet, before taking the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her bestselling debut novel, 26a, won the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers and the British Book Awards deciBel Writer of the Year prize. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough awards, and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Wonder, was also published to critical acclaim, described by The Times as ‘the most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes‘. Evans was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction for her third novel, Ordinary People, which was a New Yorker, New Statesman and Financial Times book of the year, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. Her fourth novel, A House for Alice, is the highly acclaimed follow-up, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, for which she was again shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Evans is a former dancer and has written extensively on dance, music, literature and culture for among others Time Magazine, Vogue, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books and Harper’s Bazaar, a selection of which is featured in her nonfiction collection I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations. She has been an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.