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  • Published: 6 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529937732
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $40.00

I Want to Talk to You

And Other Conversations





Portraits of icons from Maya Angelou to Viola Davis, collected alongside dazzling essays and criticism by the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Ordinary People

I am sitting in bed next to Mariah Carey. She’s wearing a pair of tiny boxer shorts and a belly-airing vest. \"You can lie down if you want\", she says. \"I mean it’s fine, be comfortable, \" so I lean further back into the pillows, feigning being comfortable.

As a young intern at Pride magazine, Diana Evans was catapulted into the role of culture editor, and so began her career as a journalist, writing about musicians, dancers and artists, interviewing the likes of Viola Davis, Alice Walker and Edward Enninful.

In these portraits of contemporary icons, the author herself remains distant – always the observer. Alongside them, in essays and pieces collected here for the first time, we see her turning the lens to the personal. We watch as she dances across stages in London and travels through Cuba. We sit beside her desk as she develops her voice as a writer, shaped by her love for Jean Rhys, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We walk by her side as she captures herself in the world – her family and the midlife sandwich, reflections on fashion, yoga, the British monarchy and lockdowns, and the lasting impact of George Floyd and Grenfell.

Crafted over twenty-five years, with the intelligence and sensitivity that Diana Evans is known for, I Want to Talk to You invites you into a conversation about literature, art, identity, and everything in between.

  • Published: 6 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529937732
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $40.00

About the author

Diana Evans

Diana Evans is a British author of Nigerian and English descent. Her bestselling novel, 26a, won the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers and the British Book Awards deciBel Writer of the Year prize. It was also shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough awards, and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Wonder, is currently under option for TV dramatisation. She is a former dancer, and as a journalist and critic has contributed to among others Marie Claire, the Independent, the Guardian, the Observer, The Times, the Telegraph, Financial Times and Harper’s Bazaar. Ordinary People is her third novel, and received an Arts Council England Grants for the Arts Award. She lives in London.

@DianaEvansOP
www.diana-evans.com

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Praise for I Want to Talk to You

One of our most outstanding writers

Bernardine Evaristo

A lyrical and glorious writer

Naomi Alderman

A writer at the top of her game

Leone Ross, on A House for Alice

Evans is always, always on the finest of forms

Candice Carty-Williams