About

Julian Evans grew up on Australia’s east coast and in the south London suburbs in the 1960s. In 1990 he left his job in London to island-hop across the Pacific Ocean by ship, small plane and boat, a journey that ended five months later at a US nuclear-missile test range at Kwajalein atoll. The book that resulted, Transit of Venus, has been described as “far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times”. Eland Press are reissuing Transit of Venus with a new afterword on 24 October 2014.

His latest book is Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis (Jonathan Cape, Picador).

He has also written and presented radio and television documentaries and writes for English and French newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and L’Atelier du Roman. He translates from French and German and is a recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française from the Académie Française. He is also a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow. He lives in Bristol and London with his two children.

To find out more, click on the menu to read selected essays and interviews and hear the radio documentaries, and to find reviews, photographs and notes on when, where and why things were written.