Kit de Waal & Diana Evans | This Writing Life
Fri 25 Apr 2025 | 8:00pm - 9:00pm




Just what the reading doctor ordered: award-winning and best-selling writers Kit de Waal (The Best of Everything) and Diana Evans (I Want to Talk to You) join us to share their wonderful new books.
Join the discussion of their writing and influences, the importance of supporting writers and the most valuable ways of doing so. Sure to be a lively and invigorating conversation about turning life and art into literature.
In conversation with Jo Browning Wroe
Venue: Palmerston Room
Duration: 1 hour
Choose your tickets:
Author Biography
Kit de Waal is the author of the novels My Name is Leon, which was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, The Trick to Time, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, a short story collection, Supporting Cast, and a memoir, Without Warning & Only Sometimes, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. She is also editor of the Common People anthology, and co-founder of the Big Book Weekend festival. My Name is Leon was adapted as a film for BBC Two.
Diana Evans is the author of the novels 26a, The Wonder, Ordinary People and A House for Alice. She was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers for 26a, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Ordinary People won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, for which A House for Alice was also a finalist. A former dancer, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her journalism and nonfiction appearing in Time magazine, the Guardian, Vogue and the Financial Times among others.
Chair Biography
Jo Browning Wroe grew up in a crematorium in Birmingham. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and is now Creative Writing Supervisor at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Her debut novel, A Terrible Kindness, was shortlisted for the Bridport Peggy Chapman-Andrews award and became an instant Sunday Times bestseller, as well as one of Waterstones’ Best Books of 2022. She lives in Cambridge.