57: Travels with Norman Lewis

About this episode

The episode explores the life and works of Norman Lewis, a notable yet underappreciated travel writer, through the insights of Julian Evans.

Norman Lewis, who died in 2003 at the age of 95, was one of the twentieth century’s most adventurous travellers and one of its most brilliant and compelling writers. He was also prolific, producing fifteen novels, twenty highly praised travel books and hundreds of influential newspaper articles. So why isn’t he better-known today? The Slightly Foxed team put this question to Julian Evans, a distinguished writer and traveller himself, author most recently of Undefeatable: Odessa in Love and War , and of Semi Invisible Man , the definitive biography of Norman Lewis. Julian took his title directly from his subject, who described himself as a ‘semi-invisible man’, a watcher from the sidelines who hated personal publicity. It was a lesson Norman learned from a hard childhood in which, as a clever boy growing up in the North London suburbs, he was severely bullied at school. His spiritualist parents, shattered by the deaths of his two older brothers, sent him to stay for some time with his Welsh grandfather and three disturbingly eccentric aunts, an interlude he described in his autobiography Jackdaw Cake. A sharp dresser with a taste for fast cars, motor bikes and guns (though he…

People in this episode

Host: Slightly Foxed Team

Guest: Julian Evans

Topics covered

• travel writing
• biography
• literature
• adventure
• personal history

Keywords

• Norman Lewis
• Julian Evans
• travel books
• biography
• literature

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Undefeatable: Odessa in Love and War, Semi Invisible Man, Jackdaw Cake, Naples ’44