In the introduction to I Want to Talk to You, her first volume of collected essays and nonfiction, the award-winning novelist Diana Evans offers possibly the most succinct and accurate distinction between the modes of journalism and fiction that I have encountered in 25 years of trying to do both. “The journalism voice is direct, conspicuous and definite. The fiction voice is nebulous, shadowy, prefers to disappear in order to speak.” After four successful novels and more than two decades of writing across the British press, for magazines such as Pride, Vogue and Granta, plus the Observer and the Financial Times, Evans goes on to explain: “They’re still arguing. They still would rather I choose between them.” But she has eventually concluded that both can and should coexist as ways of seeing: “All writing is in some way a voyage of disappearance, a departure from the self outwards into the world.”

The careful selection of pieces here, grouped not only chronologically but thematically, illustrate Evans’s development as a writer, from her earliest interviews with huge cultural figures (Alice Walker, Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill) in the late 90s to her most recent comment pieces on, among other subjects, the murder of George Floyd, Steve McQueen’s Grenfell and the ICC’s judgment on Netanyahu. She sets the earlier articles in context with brief introductions, explaining the significance of publications such as Pride, one of “a host of magazines and newspapers that had come into being as a response to the mainstream media routinely ignoring or misrepresenting black life and culture”. Evans, then in her 20s, was unexpectedly thrust into the role of culture editor a week after starting at Pride as an intern, and though she writes of her initial nerves, it’s clear that a distinctive and empathetic voice is present in her earliest interviews. Eventually, this voice outgrows the constraints of the form (“I found journalism creatively stifling”), and she takes another leap into the unknown, leaving her “perfectly bearable life in London” to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

In this next iteration of her writing self, she shares – often with self-deprecating humour – the tortuous process of wrestling a novel into being, beginning with the background to her debut, 26a, which won the inaugural Orange award for new writers in 2005. As she explains in an essay paying homage to Jean Rhys as inspiration, 26a came out of a process more than usually painful for a first-time novelist, drawing as it did on the death of Evans’s twin sister at the age of 26. “It was the breaking of me and the making of me,” she writes, though she bristles at the frequently asked question of whether writing it was cathartic: “It appears to imply that the intention in crafting a story drawn from the personal is innately healing, and the approach to doing so is self-serving, rather than an outward offering.”

Throughout, Evans is interested in this idea of looking outwards, and the role of the story in shaping the political and cultural landscape. “What was its social value? What was the essential resonance I wanted to leave behind?” she demands of herself in relation to that first novel. These questions underpin all the personal essays in the book, whether the subject is her own writing or commentary on broader current affairs. The later pieces here demonstrate a mature confidence, what Elizabeth Hardwick calls “the assumption of the authority to speak in one’s own voice”. Whether Evans is writing about her former life as a professional dancer, her relationship with her Nigerian heritage, dress-making, yoga or motherhood, there is a sense that she is restlessly searching for the point of connection where the personal becomes communal. Over the years, this has required the courage “to fly fully in the face of the traditional, dismissive patriarchal reception of female subjectivity, where so much that is valuable and meaningful lies”.

Evans’s nonfiction marries that faith in the value of subjective experience to a fierce interrogatory intellect; the result is a fascinating overview not only of a writer’s evolution but of the shifts in our understanding of art as (to quote Bernardine Evaristo from Evans’s profile included here) “activism and community”.

• I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations by Diana Evans is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply