Hello, this is Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today is an award winning author who studied creative writing at Bath Spa and Goldsmiths University.
Her first novel, after the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Riis Prize and a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, the Commonwealth Prize and many others.
In 2013, she was included on Granta magazine's Once a Decade Best of Young British Novelist lists.
Her second novel, all the Birds Singing, won countless awards including the Miles Franklin, the Encore and the Jerwood Fiction Prize.
As well as writing, she runs A Review, the independent bookshop based in Peckham, South London.
Her latest novel, the Echoes, looks at the themes of love and grief, including those who discover secrets and who has the right to reveal them.
Evie Wilde, welcome to Meet the Writers.
Hello, thanks for having me.
I have to remind you that we first met at Cheltenham Festival and we were doing a panel about the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.
And I think it was you in fact, who was reading from the Wind Up Bird Chronicles.
It was that bit, wasn't it, where the skin is peeled off?
That really, really gruesome bit.
Yeah.
And then in the audience somebody fainted and you and I just kind of looked at each other in terror and you carri on reading and I pretended that I couldn't see what was going on as the St.
John's ambulance came in and very quietly took her out.
I know thinking back, not the best section to read to an audience.
Oh my goodness.
But I was asked about six months before, you know, what part of Murakami reading changed the way you write.