!['I don't know a novel that is not traumatic': Evie Wyld in her bookshop](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000383620652_17206998200830_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqW7XtYDHaasERSbk57vrDwZQd0gUcdddCv0EDOkSO7vg.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Novelist Evie Wyld: ‘My father died at 6am. By 7am we were all trashed’
The prize-winning author on the ‘twee’ ways we talk about death – and why it feels ‘uncomfortable to be English pretty much anywhere’
!['I don't know a novel that is not traumatic': Evie Wyld in her bookshop](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000383620652_17206998200830_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqW7XtYDHaasERSbk57vrDwZQd0gUcdddCv0EDOkSO7vg.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Lurking in Evie Wyld’s family tree is a great-great-grandfather killed on Percy Island, Australia, during the 1800s. “He was a botanist and he was murdered by indigenous people,” says Wyld, the daughter of an English art-dealer father and an Australian mother. “Which begs the question: what did he do? For anyone who has white history in Australia, there are scary things to reach out and touch.”
Wyld, who was born in Peckham, south London, and still lives there 44 years later, has been reaching out towards this history throughout her career as a novelist. Her John Llewellyn Rhys Prize-winning debut, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (2009) – about an Australian Vietnam War veteran afflicted with PTSD – was inspired by her uncle. He once showed her photographs of the boys he had killed in combat, leaving Wyld unsure, she says, whether he considered the images to be “trophies or memorials”.
Her 2014 novel All the Birds, Singing was a stealthy, skin-tingling investigation into what might have compelled a young, female sheep farmer to flee Australia for a remote British island. Then, The Bass Rock (2020) followed three generations of women who had lived in the same Scottish coastal house, including one character inspired by Wyld’s heavy-drinking paternal grandmother.
Next month brings her generation-spanning fourth novel, The Echoes, which centres on Hannah, a young woman in England estranged from her Australian family. Among its multiple voices is that of Hannah’s recently deceased boyfriend, Max, although Wyld is quick to tell me that she doesn’t believe in ghosts. “My father had not long died when I was writing the book, and as soon as the first person close to you dies, there is this very strange resetting of time,” she says. “There are a lot of twee ways of talking about death, but the moment you have that loss, the feeling of people sinking into the earth or into the atmosphere feels very real and correct.”
Wyld is a startling literary talent – she earned a spot on Granta’s 2013 list of the 20 best British writers under 40 – who has never quite enjoyed the mainstream success she deserves. Perhaps this is partly because her novels are so difficult to categorise. They tend to be saturated in the vaguely sinister beauty of the Australian countryside, heavy with a sense of things unsaid and simmering with anger.
![Some titles by novelist Evie Wyld](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000385212373_17207021848580_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The Echoes contains several spiky women, including Hannah, who is a bit of a nightmare to live with and ambivalent about motherhood. “There is still this expectation around women that they should give up everything when they become mothers,” says Wyld, who has a nine-year-old son with her husband, Jamie Coleman, who works in publishing.
“I used to breastfeed my son on the South Bank so that he could sleep and I could work for an hour at the National Theatre. The number of people who came up to me and said, ‘He would be better off at home.’ And I would think, ‘F--- off, I wouldn’t be better off at home.’ It goes without saying how I feel about my son, but I often think about that Evie, who I left behind, who wasn’t going to have children. Happily, the generation beneath me don’t seem so bothered by the need to couple up and become parents. Whereas me and my friends were steeped in this idea that you were not whole unless you were with someone else.”
Recently, a young woman at an event asked her why her books featured so many women who like a drink. “Up to that point, I hadn’t thought that was unusual,” Wyld says with an embarrassed laugh. “I’m half-British, half-Australian, I’m of the generation who would just cane it. And it’s also a useful crutch in fiction. The English are very good at facing some traumatic experience by saying, ‘Well, we should probably have a drink.’ My father died at six in the morning and by seven we were all trashed. Because what else are you going to do?”
Wyld has never fully resolved the tension between her Australian and English identities. “When I was young, we would spend holidays with my maternal grandparents, who had moved to a sugar-cane farm in New South Wales,” she says. “To me, it was idyllic, going from Peckham, where in the 1980s I would never be allowed to leave the house by myself, to this place where as a child you could just go off fishing for the day. It was a place of daydreams for me.”
Yet these days, she says, “I feel a bit embarrassed as an English person in Australia. In fact, it’s uncomfortable to be English pretty much anywhere; to be from such a small island that went out and caused so much harm.” Her novels are attempts not just to understand this legacy, but to humanise it. The Echoes is partly set on the site of a former school for Australia’s “stolen generations”, the children forcibly removed from the indigenous population throughout the 20th century and sent for re-education; although not as present as Max, their ghosts are just as real.
“My mother remembers the stolen being talked about in her home: her family would say, ‘Yes, it’s sad, but they are not real people,’” Wyld says. “So I’m also very interested in how the people I love do bad things.” It makes her think of something the comedian Sarah Silverman once said about her disgraced fellow stand-up Louis C K: “I love Louis. But Louis did these [bad] things. Both of those statements are true.” Wyld explains: “We’re at a place in history where we seem to prefer to view people as black or white, and we draw a line under them as a result. If there is a point to The Echoes, it’s about understanding why people do what they do.”
All the same, so sensitive is the subject of Australia’s historic treatment of its indigenous population that an editor suggested to Wyld that it might be better for her to take out the scenes in The Echoes that deal most directly with it. “They felt it would be safer,” she says. “But I thought that was dangerous. To me, a large part of the problem is the inadequacy of white Australians to tell this particular story. And I get it, because I’m inarticulate, too, and there is so much feeling that nothing can possibly be enough, and I don’t want to put a toe wrong. But I also think it’s very important not to pretend that perfectly nice, well-meaning white people are not also racist. I strongly subscribe to the idea that we are all racist, as well as many of us, hopefully, being anti-racist. Because how do you live within a racist society without absorbing some of it? You can’t. But you can notice it and try to grapple with it.”
![Novelist Evie Wyld](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000383620654_17207001442440_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqzKLaScT_14yJfCjzNAaya70zF_b9hXgUFIP8yeMNVKg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Does she fear the attempted editorial interference she experienced is part of a wider anxiety within fiction publishing about what can and cannot be said? “I think there is definitely a sense of the novel becoming used as a social tool in quite a blunt way,” says Wyld, who also teaches creative writing at the University of Kent.
“I remember having a conversation with one of my students about some homophobic language in Max Porter’s [2019 novel] Lanny. Although it would have been clear to most readers that the language reflected the homophobia that exists, he was so upset by it, he couldn’t read on. I’ve found a lot of students unwilling to read certain traumatic novels. But I don’t know a novel that isn’t traumatic. That’s the whole point of them.”
Wyld juggles writing and teaching with running a bookshop in Peckham, which she set up with a friend in 2007, “although these days my business partner does most of the work”. Three of her novels have been optioned for film – although none has yet been produced – and she is just starting to dip a toe into writing for television (although she declines to divulge any details).
First, though, she has a summer of literary appearances, including one at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. What does she think of the controversy surrounding its sponsor Baillie Gifford, the investment management firm, which severed ties with the festival following protests from climate-change activists over its investments in fossil fuels and in companies with links to Israel’s defence, tech and cybersecurity industries, and the threat of authors dropping out? “At a certain point, literature is not as important as the world,” she says. Did she consider dropping out of Edinburgh herself?
“I did think about it. But I’m not sure I’m important enough that anyone would have noticed,” she laughs. “But I also think silence is problematic. It’s important to keep talking rather than not show up.”
The Echoes (Vintage, £18.99) will be published on Aug 1