Julian Evans

Julian Evans grew up on Australia’s east coast and in the south London suburbs in the 1960s. In the 1990s he left his job in London to island-hop across the Pacific Ocean, a journey that ended five months later at a US nuclear-missile testing 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’ and was reissued by Eland Books in 2014. He is also the author of an acclaimed biography of the writer and adventurer Norman Lewis, Semi-invisible Man (2008).

Julian has written and presented radio and TV documentaries, including BBC Radio 3’s 20-part series on the rise of the European novel, The Romantic Road, and the BBC Four film José Saramago: a life of resistance. He is a recipient of the Académie Française Prize for the Advancement of French Literature.

He has also written about the war in Ukraine from the frontline, and his latest book is a personal history of the city of Odesa. He discovered Odesa ‘by accident’ more than twenty-five years ago and, having got married there in a monastery opposite the main train station, has been returning to the city ever since. A dramatic and intimate story of Ukrainian-Russian relations, Undefeatable: Odesa in love and war (2024), is a lover’s portrait of a singularly human, irrepressible city.