Phoebe Weston-Evans

Phoebe Weston-Evans is a translator and doctoral student currently living in Paris. She is researching the works of French novelist Patrick Modiano. Her English translation of Modiano’s Paris Nocturne, published by Yale University Press and Text Publishing, was nominated for the 2016 PEN America Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2016 Australian Academy of Humanities Translation Medal. Phoebe has published with French Cultural Studies and is associate editor of the peer-reviewed journal The French Australian Review.

Phoebe Weston-Evans reviews 'Animalia' by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne

August 2019, no. 413 • 05 July 2019

If you’re squeamish, this book probably isn’t for you. Each page delivers shocking or mundane violence and descriptions of guts and gore so frank they become a kind of poetry. There is clear relish in Del Amo’s depictions, and there is nothing gratuitous about them; he brings us rivetingly close to each fold of decrepit skin, the agonies of labour, the fantastic indifference of nature. With ... (read more)

Phoebe Weston-Evans reviews 'So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood' by Patrick Modiano, translated by Euan Cameron

September 2017, no. 394 • 24 August 2017

Patrick Modiano’s most recent novel, published just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2014, is his twenty-sixth to date, though one of a great number to arrive almost all at once in the English-speaking world. In the post-Nobel flurry to translate Modiano into English, the past two years have marked a shift in the author’s status from practically unknown to international renown. ... (read more)

Letter from Paris

June-July 2017, no. 392 • 25 May 2017

Springtime allows Parisians to indulge their predilection for life en terrasse. Trees and gardens are blooming, neighbourhood markets and squares are coming alive, and the newly pedestrianised right bank of the Seine is busy with walkers and cyclists. A rollerblading poet stopped to cadge some tobacco from a friend of mine as we were sitting outside a bar on rue de Belleville one afternoon. He as ... (read more)