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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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

Just astounding.

But Jonathan, we haven't even talked about the book that you and I have read together.

But guess what?

This one takes us back to the very first thing that I asked Hannah Kent, which is about homesickness, belonging, moving between countries and communities.

So actually, Hannah, even though you haven't read this one, we're expecting you to have opinions.

Oh, excellent.

I will chime in.

Yes.

Although perhaps we should say who he is.

So he's a British Cotetian writer, is that how you say it?

But when it opens, so it opens on a ship with this man who's about 27.

He's coming to England with all the sort of, well, with a mixture of the promises that migration might bring to a clever young man who would like to be a journalist.

But he is also a bit sceptical about the promise that has been offered him and the way that his family understands it.

And I thought it was just going to be a narrative about this character.

But it's not.

Well, and we get all these portraits of sort of mildly disappointed lives, which is an interesting approach for a novelist to take, I think, because we don't just stay with Victor.

We meet people he works with in a pub, women he's had relationships with, a Jewish, I think, Polish man.

Yes, and I think it deliberately is, again, to use BJ's term, it's wrong-footing us because we think we know what a migrant story of belonging and not belonging does.

And in a conventional sense, this character, Victor, and I think the author, expects that what we want is a story of growth and belonging.

And even the fact that other people have called this man lucky because they presume that any migrant who comes from the West Indies to London, what a lucky man.

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