Diana Evans is the author of the novels 26a, The Wonder and Ordinary People. She has received nominations for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book and the Commonwealth Best First Book awards and was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. 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 and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and also received a nomination for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction. Her journalism appears in Time magazine, the Guardian, Vogue and the Financial Times. She is an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. www.diana-evans.com
“To the writer working alone at her desk in the effort to transmit her thoughts and stories to the world outside, the support, endorsement and encouragement of the literary community can mean the difference between reaching the summit and ambling indefinitely by the wayside. This prize will help to unveil in a contemporary light the persisting rich tradition of writing by Black and Asian women in Britain, nurturing and feeding new voices so that we might one day, with increasing frequency, walk into a bookshop, pick up a volume and find ourselves alive and true and teaming within its pages.”
