Christine Evans in-conversation with Hilary Bell

Nadia moves between the competing perspectives of two survivors of the 1990s Balkan Wars who have escaped to London, only to discover that the war has followed them there. Nadia is a young refugee who just wants to forget the past—until Iggy starts temping at her London office. Afraid he may be a sniper from the war she fled, Nadia starts seeing threats everywhere, alongside unsettling visions of her lost girlfriend, Sanja. As her volatile connection with Iggy unravels, Nadia is forced to face the ethically shaky choices she made to escape the war, her survivor guilt, and her disavowed queer sexuality.

Christine Evans's novel takes us to the recent past of a war that broke apart a European country and that presciently foreshadowed the rise of ethno-nationalism in the West. Tense, suspenseful, and mordantly funny, Nadia tracks the complex ways in which a past marked by political violence can shadow and disrupt the present.

Christine Evans writes internationally produced plays, opera libretti, and fiction. Her novel, Nadia, “shockingly original, stunningly written…fierce, funny and tragic” (Caroline Leavitt), “often brutal, sometimes lovely and always humane” (Foreword starred review) was published in 2023 (U Iowa Press.) Christine’s theater and opera work has been staged at the Sydney Opera House (Three Marys, composer Andrée Greenwell), Belvoir, Arts Above (West End, London), the American Repertory Theater and many other venues, and her work is published by Concord Theatricals. She has received fellowships from Varuna, MacDowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco Foundation, Bellagio and elsewhere, and is a recipient of five DC Council on the Arts & Humanities Fellowships.  She served as Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English at Harvard (2007-12) and is currently a professor of performing arts at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She dreams of dividing her time between Sydney, London and Mexico, but mostly she moves between home and the nearest cafe.

Hilary Bell is a multi-award-winning playwright and lyricist. Her work has been produced nationally by the Sydney Theatre Company, Ensemble, Belvoir, Griffin, Black Swan, Deckchair, La Boite, NORPA, National Theatre of Parramatta, Sydney Opera House, Arts Centre Melbourne, Vitalstatistix and Darlinghurst Theatre Company. Internationally she’s been produced by theatres including Atlantic and Steppenwolf (USA) and The National (UK). Wolf Lullaby, won the inaugural Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award in 1995 and remains on the school syllabus. Other awards include the Jill Blewitt, Bug’n’Bub (USA), Aurealis Fiction, the Eric Kocher (USA), Inscription, two Australian Writers Guild Awards, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize shortlist. She was the 2003-04 Tennessee Williams Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of the South, Tennessee, and in 2013 the Patrick White Playwriting Fellow at the STC. Hilary is a graduate of the Juilliard Playwrights’ Studio, NIDA and AFTRS. She has served on boards including Griffin, ANPC and Australian Plays, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the State Library of NSW. She is a member of 7-ON Playwrights and a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect. Hilary is the creator, with illustrator Antonia Pesenti, of several picture books, including the best-selling Alphabetical Sydney. Currently she is writing a musical adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock with Gertler Gold, directed by Jo Bonney, and is collaborating with Michael Gracey, Jacob Collier and Scenario Two on a new musical.