Wednesday 11th September 2024
On September 11th a good crowd of us were at the Institute when Rose Gant had a splendid conversation with Eva Verde. As a white, elderly man who had not, at that moment, actually read any of Eva's writing, I wondered whether references online to her rage and her mission to speak 'for all the brown faces in all the white spaces' might be tricky for me. Not at all. From the moment she and Rose began to talk, we all felt included in a searching but welcoming atmosphere. As Eva read from the opening pages of her latest book, In Bloom, I was among those who realised that Eva's angle on the world was worth sharing, with inter-generational affections and tensions, in a family with mixed heritages and caught in the complexities of British society.
Eva now lives in Essex, but was raised in the eastern parts of London. Hers was not a home where books were much read, but Eva says she had always been drawn to them. She not only read, she tried writing as well. The books she mentions as especially memorable include Little Women and Jane Eyre and the novels of Virginia C. Andrews. She also mentioned Stephen King, whose influence on her may be a surprise. The important thing was her appetite for reading and for invented characters. At last, with a family, a Labrador and a home, some distance from the place of her roots, she longed to write seriously. The Open University beckoned, with the creative writing course to give her increasing confidence. Writing is a therapy, she says. But for her it's surely a vocation.
Her teenage children, she confessed, do not take much notice of her literary life. But a supportive husband enables her to find the space a writer needs to turn life into fiction, experience into art. Eva described her creative pattern as chaotic. But I bet her characters, so alive for her, are forever behind her thoughts and dreams. And, with the care she receives from Clare at Simon and Schuster, the creative tap is flowing fast. There are two books promised for the coming year to complement the two already selling well.
For me, her books will be a strange world, a world I now want to visit with her book in my hand.
Keith Jones
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