About Evie
Evie Wyld was born in London and grew up in Australia and South London. She studied creative writing at Bath Spa and Goldsmiths University. Her first novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, the Commonwealth Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award. In 2013 she was included on Granta Magazine's once a decade Best of Young British Novelists list.
Her second novel All the Birds, Singing won the Miles Franklin Award, the Encore Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award and longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction.
She runs Review, a small independent bookshop in Peckham, south London.
Read the Reviews
“Just sometimes, a book is so complete, so compelling and potent, that you are fearful of breaking its hold. This is one.”
“A talent to watch.”
“My favourite book this year was Evie Wyld's After the Fire, A Still Small Voice. Wyld has written a great and intelligent story, sophisticated and gripping, sad and gorgeous. Two men, two lives, a generation apart, their battlefields, and a bakery, and not a false note in the whole book. It's a stunner and Wyld is the real thing.”
“A very impressive first novel. Wise and wry, it uses its Australian bush setting to great effect, Wyld's protagonists fleeing there from wars, both literal and familial. She writes great characters and makes you love them as she nails them.”
“This is a highly accomplished first novel. Evie Wyld is not a show off writer. She has a clean, clear prose style which is exactly right in the service if her story, and the best ear for dialogue in a long time.”
“One of the most exquisitely rendered books - let alone debuts - I have read in years.”
“This superb first novel is about fathers and sons, and the forces that turn men brutish.”
“A fiercely assured debut.”
“Wyld has a feel both for beauty and for the ugliness of inherited pain.”
“Wyld is a languorous writer with great skill in characterisation. This, her debut, will delight many.”
“The landscape of Australia's east coast looms large in the book, wild and sinister, filled with light and tragedy. This is a sad and lovely novel from a talented new writer.”
“A terrifically self-assured debut...a cauterising, cleansing tale, told with muscular writing.”
“Mesmerising...this adroit examination of loss, lostness and trauma is the beginning of great things.”
“Written in pith, crystal-sharp prose, this is a compelling read that uses the Australian landscape to mirror its characters' equally unforgiving emotional terrain.”
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“Told with quiet, characterful poise, the noel succeeds in evoking not only Australia's epic geographical landscape, but its literary terrain too summoning echoes of some of that country's finest writer.”
“Wyld's superb skills at portraying a hot, dusty landscape and her psychological insight will pull you inexorably in.”
“A searing study of the way war-induced damage passes from fathers to sons...Uniting the disparate narratives is Wyld's brisk, atmospheric style and her fascination with men who commit appalling acts, but are not appalling people.”
“This is a young writer with talent to burn.”
“Wyld's debut novel dissects the misery that seeps inexorably from one generation to the next.”
“Wyld can write very well, in a vivid descriptive style reminiscent of Tim Winton's.”
“An assured and astonishing debut novel.”
“Wyld sympathetically explores the blight of war and violence on three generations of a working-class Australian family.”
“Astonishingly assured...a stunning work from a brilliant new voice.”
“Creepy but gripping, it’s also a novel with a twist that doesn’t undermine everything that came before. Don’t be surprised if this debut starts cropping up at book groups - it deserves to.”
“Its richness of prose is evocative.”
“Superb assured first novel about fathers and sons. Pitch-perfect prose.”
“A jewel of a book.”
“At times startling, Wyld's book is ruminative and dramatic, with deep reserves of empathy colored by masculine rage and repression.”
“At last, in a world that shouts, a novel that doesn't need to. A revelation and a joy - wild, wise and wonderful.”
“Evie Wyld's book is dark, intense and haunting. The descriptions of Australia's East Coast are vivid, the landscapes, the language, the settings, the feelings are real and palpable. Her prose reminded me of Patrick White's, her imagery of Les Murray and Judith Wright -- like all these writers Wyld is both lyrical and tragic, uncompromising in her evocation of that sad, strange, complicated country. She belongs to a tradition of serious Australian literature that is now being taken as seriously as it deserves.”
“Stunningly good. Evie Wyld hides herself perfectly and it has a whole dark and brilliant life of its own. There's not a single false note in the whole book: it's totally convincing, and written with incredible toughness, sureness and maturity. A terrifyingly good debut.”
“A brilliant, transporting novel of such warmth and stunning evocative language that I wanted to read it all over again. Evie Wyld has a deft way of capturing the light, the nature of the place, of the natives. This is a rich account of two men's lives, separated through time and their own inability to reach out... Time does funny things in the book as it would in the desert; it undoes things, rather like this book has done to me.”
“It's a sensational debut, rich in literary fireworks and human drama. There are moments which still the breath - all you can hear is the sound of your own heart beating.”