Kate Evans
speaker
26,301 appearances
191 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2018
last heard yesterday
Kate Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 25 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
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.
And he's living this grim life where he keeps on being chucked out of places that he's trying to rent because nobody wants to rent to this black man.
And possibly of loss and ambition and possibilities not quite fulfilled.
I thought it was an interesting choice.
And I wondered what Hannah would make of this, this idea that if you're telling a story that is partly about migration and ideas of home, that you don't just focus on the direct migrant story, that you also tell a story about other people in the community who are
seeing their country change and who've maybe moved from the country to the city, from Liverpool to London, and that you're sort of coming at it so that it's not one narrative.
And I like the way that Victor is quite irritated about all that.
I mean, he's sort of irritated in his memory of his family and his father.
Yes, but he's also trapped by people's expectation that he should be loving it and believing that he's living this great and successful life.
And instead, he's moving from one...
thing to the other, which makes it sound like a sort of grim doer story, which it sort of is and it isn't.
I mean, I wanted to stay with these characters.
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