Kate Evans

speaker

26,072 appearances 190 recordings 3 series first heard Feb 2018 last heard 6d ago

Kate Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 24 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Bookshelf · Melbourne Writers' Festival with Hannah Kent and Beejay Silcox · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

And the structure is quite carefully almost like a spiral.

So we have the loss of this man in about 1977 or 1978.

We go back into his family story and then the mother, Anne, is a... Well, she's this fascinating character.

She's the youngest of a very large family, but she ends up being almost overlooked in that family.

And so she's...

excised from that family for most of the story but when she was 19 she had a baby and immediately put that baby up for adoption and we can instantly imagine the trauma of that experience but that's just one of the many traumas and sometimes you don't return to a character for another

100 pages, 120 pages, and it might be in 10 years later or it might be 15 years earlier.

And so there are lots of those, uh-huh.

moments and moments of sort of shock and moments of disruption and it does sort of feel like you're always going to be returning to that moment on the beach and every time you think you're getting close to it you slip away and you sometimes even slip away into other countries other families other histories other histories yeah

And I must say that Eric Kupner's Dream State is also one of those big novels, and it's using it, doing it through marriage.

But one thing I will say is that I did get about two-thirds of the way and suddenly think, has she written two novels here?

And should this other story...

which is the big one that we're not talking about, should this have been its own separate novel?

And then I got to the end and I thought, well, no, she needed to have all that stuff there because it ties everything together.

But I was at about two thirds of the way through.

I thought, hang on, am I reading something completely different?

Because I loved the first half.

It was extraordinary.

And then it had to do what it did.

But there are entire lives that go past in one sentence or one paragraph.

Showing 2421–2440 of 26,072 · page 122 of 1304