I Want to Talk to You
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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

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
4 Feb 2025
EBook
6 Feb 2025
Audiobook
6 Feb 2025
Hardback
6 Mar 2025
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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
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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

Also by Diana Evans

Ordinary People
The Wonder
26a
See all

Praise for I Want to Talk to You

Luminously questioning, always intelligent and unafraid of confronting the impact others can have on us

ORE AGBAJE-WILLIAMS, author of The Three of Us

A celebration of a career that has been anything but ordinary and an intellectual mind forever evolving. A blueprint for all of us straddling between fiction and journalism, who want to create meaningful, transcendent work

CHARLIE BRINKHURST-CUFF, editor of Mother Country

An intimate and moving meditation on the mysteries of writing and the pleasures of reading. Elegant in tone and finely wrought in form, it is a deeply insightful, and also profoundly enjoyable, collection

EKOW ESHUN, author of The Strangers

There is a depth and integrity to Diana Evans’s writing; every piece feels beautifully sewn together and complete

BERNARDINE EVARISTO

Evans’s nonfiction marries that faith in the value of subjective experience to a fierce intellect; the result is a fascinating overview not only of a writer’s evolution but of the shifts in our understanding of art as…"activism and community"

Stephanie Merritt, Observer

Thoughtfully layered pieces... deeply personal

Megan Conner, Red

A pleasure and an invigoration

Alex Clark, Guardian

Perceptive and empathetic... This was always going to be a book that grabs you by the lapels and insists on you listening but all the same, you do emerge impressed and better informed -- and also kind of windswept and happy

Sue Gaisford, Financial Times

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