‘Failure was my thing’: Virginia Evans on her long journey to success

Just as the interview begins at a drizzly party in a leafy London square, someone interrupts to congratulate Virginia Evans — it is Richard Curtis. Her prize-winning novel, The Correspondent, a warm-hearted weepy with gentle humour, already has a film in the pipeline with Jane Fonda lined up to play 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp; Evans will be one of the producers and says she will have a cameo, 'walking a dog or something'.

She wrote the book in a closet, having removed her husband’s clothes, over nine months in a rented house in North Carolina during the 2020 pandemic, and the epistolary novel went on to spend 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Evans, who turned 40 earlier this month, is no overnight success.

She has written two hours a day between 5am and 7am since she was 19, completing seven unpublished novels before The Correspondent.

United Kingdom, London

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