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I Want to Talk to You

I Want to Talk to You

And Other Conversations

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 magazine intern, Diana Evans was catapulted overnight 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 remains the observer. Alongside them, in pieces collected here for the first time, we also see her turning the lens on herself. We watch as she dances on 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 navigates 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 for which Diana Evans is celebrated, I Want to Talk to You invites you into a conversation about literature, art and music, identity, and everything in between.

'Truly insightful, conversational and unique... Absolutely brilliant' ORE AGBAJE-WILLIAMS
'
Intimate and moving... Elegant in tone and finely wrought in form' EKOW ESHUN

© Diana Evans 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Reviews

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

About the author

Diana Evans

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. She lives in London.


www.diana-evans.com
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