Evie Wyld

In 2013 London bookseller Evie Wyld was named one of Granta’s best British novelists under 40 – though she grew up in rural Australia, where both of her novels are set. Her first book, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, a moving love letter to Queensland, won several awards.

Her most recent book, All the Birds, Singing, is a darkly beautiful novel infused with a palpable sense of dread. Parallel stories follow a woman raising sheep on a remote English island and a shearer on the run in Western Australia.

Reviewing it in the Sydney Morning Herald, Mandy Sayer wrote that Wyld’s background ‘has served her well in creating a fictional world so visceral, masculine and dangerous that she could be thought of as a love child of Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton’.

Wyld returns to antipodean shores to discuss her latest novel and the dual life of an Australian author living in England. She appears in conversation with Benjamin Law.