Literary Birthday – 16 June – Evie Wyld

Happy Birthday, Evie Wyld, born 16 June 1980.

Five Quotes

As a feminist you feel you have to be actively doing things to relieve women’s plight. Actually, feminism is just thinking we should have the same rights as men
Just like everything else, writing takes practice, and I believe that the right creative writing degree can be hugely helpful. If you are a good writer and you do a creative writing degree, you are given the time to write and you are able to talk to other writers. You read widely, and through your classmates’ mistakes you pick up your own more efficiently. But it’s only helpful if you go in with a certain amount of openness.
There’ll always be students who consider their work perfect as it comes out – and perhaps there are a lucky few for whom that is true – but most of us need time and advice and criticism.
I always wanted to be a painter, but I wasn’t very good at painting. When I was at school I found I received the same satisfaction from writing a short story that I did doing awful self-portraits – only the results were much better.
I always start out with one character and then to get to know them I find it essential to find out about their childhood, their parents, and sometimes their parents’ parents. I feel like a person is so much their past that I find it almost impossible to write about someone just in the now.

Evie Wyld is an Anglo-Australian author. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009, and her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award in 2013 and the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. Visit her website eviewyld.com and follow her on Twitter: @eviewyld