The Shift with Sam Baker podcast is back for a new season. (It was actually back last week but I forgot to do this email, sorry. I’ll pop a link to last week’s episode with former ESPN journalist and basketball player Kate Fagan at the bottom.) Anyway, moving swiftly on…
My guest this week is the novelist, journalist and critic Diana Evans.
Listen to the full episode here:
Diana is the award-winning author of four novels 26a, The Wonder, Ordinary People and A House for Alice. She has been shortlisted for countless awards including the Women’s Prize (she’s also a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year) and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature for Ordinary People. She has, as she puts it, been writing against invisibility her entire life.
Before all that she was a dancer, with the Brighton-based African and Caribbean troupe Mashango, and then a journalist (she was arts and music editor of Pride magazine). Some of her best work is now published as I Want To Talk To You, a collection of essays in which she examines the personal and the political, interviews icons and looks at the realities of ageing and thwarted expectation.
Like many of you listening, Diana is also a woman caught in the midlife sandwich of children and ageing parents. She joined me from her home in south London to talk ageing, experience and expectation. We covered compulsive worrying, growing up in a “girl bubble”, the hazards of being a “doer”, turning 50 without her twin, how caring for a parent can be “bigger than childbirth” and why we no longer need an aesthetic licence in middle age.
Listen to the full episode here:
• And if you missed last week’s opening episode to season 16 (!) with Kate Fagan talking about her problematic relationship with ambition, crossing the 40 threshold and why she really wants to be a TOD, you can catch up with it here:
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