Best-selling novelists Clare Chambers (Small Pleasures) and Lissa Evans (Old Baggage) interview each other about their new books,
Shy Creatures and Small Bomb at Dimperley, both of which tackle significant moments of social change.
Clare Chambers:
Clare Chambers was born in south east London in 1966. She studied English at Oxford and spent the year after graduating in New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms, published when she was 25. Learning to Swim won the Romantic Novelists’ Association best novel award and was adapted as a Radio 4 play, and In a Good Light was longlisted for the Whitbread best novel prize.
Clare began her career as a secretary at the publisher André Deutsch. Some of the experiences of working for an eccentric, independent publisher in the pre-digital era found their way into her novel The Editor’s Wife. When her three children were teenagers, inspired by their reading habits, she produced two YA novels, Bright Girls and Burning Secrets.
Small Pleasures was the winner of the British Book Awards 2022 Pageturner Book of the Year and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021.
Lissa Evans
Lissa Evans grew up in the West Midlands. She comes from a family of voracious readers and spent most of her adolescence in the local library, thus becoming well read if not wildly popular.
After studying medicine at Newcastle University, she worked as a junior doctor for four years, before deciding to change to a career in which she wasn’t terrified the entire time; a job in BBC Radio light entertainment followed, and then a switch to television, where she produced and directed series including ‘Room 101’ and also ‘Father Ted’, for which she won a BAFTA.
Her first book, ‘Spencer’s List’ was published in 2002, and since then she has written five more novels for adults (one of which, ‘Their Finest Hour and a Half’, was filmed in 2017) and four novels for children. She lives in London with her husband and two daughters. She still reads voraciously.
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