Bernardine Evaristo


Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo, MBE FRSL FRSA, FEA, is a British author of eight works of fiction. Her novel, Girl, Woman, Other, won the Booker Prize in 2019, British Book Awards: Fiction and Author of the Year 2020, and the Indie Book Award for Fiction 2020. It was also one of Barack Obama's 19 Favourite Books of 2019. In June 2020 she became the first woman of colour and the first black British writer to assume the No.1 spot in the UK paperback fiction charts. Evaristo's writing also includes short fiction, drama, poetry, essays, literary criticism, and projects for stage and radio. Two of her books, The Emperor's Babe and Hello Mum, have been adapted into BBC Radio 4 dramas. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and the vice-chair of the Royal Society of Literature.
Evaristo is a longstanding advocate for the inclusion of writers and artists of colour. She founded the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2012 and The Complete Works poets development scheme. She co-founded Spread the Word writer development agency and, in the 1980s, Britain's first black women's theatre company, Theatre of Black Women. She also organised Britain's first major black theatre conference, Future Histories, for the Black Theatre Forum, in 1995 in the Royal Festival Hall, and Britain's first major conference on black British writing, Tracing Paper, in 1997, at the Museum of London.

Biography

Evaristo was born in Eltham, south-east London, and christened Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo. She was raised in Woolwich. She is the fourth of eight children born to her white English mother, who was a schoolteacher, and her Nigerian father, who migrated to Britain in 1949 and became a welder and local Labour councillor. Her paternal grandfather was a Yoruba Aguda who returned from Brazil to Nigeria, and her paternal grandmother was from Abeokuta in Nigeria. Her mother's paternal great-grandfather arrived in London from Germany in the 1860s and settled in Woolwich, south-east London, and her mother's maternal grandmother arrived in London from Ireland in the 1880s and settled in Islington. Evaristo was educated at Greenwich Young People's Theatre, Eltham Hill Grammar School for Girls, the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and Goldsmiths College, University of London, from where she received her doctorate in creative writing in 2013. In 2019 she was appointed Woolwich Laureate by the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, reconnecting to and writing about the home town she left when she was 18.

Writer and editor

Evaristo is the author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora. She notably experiments with form and narrative perspective, often merging the past with the present, fiction with poetry, the factual with the speculative, and reality with alternate realities. Her verse novel The Emperor's Babe is about a black teenage girl whose parents are from Nubia, who comes of age in Roman London nearly two thousand years ago. It won an Arts Council Writers Award 2000; a NESTA Fellowship Award in 2003; it was chosen by The Times as one of the "100 Best Books of the Decade" in 2010; and it was adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2013. Next Evaristo published Soul Tourists, about a mismatched couple driving across Europe to the Middle East, which featured ghosts of real figures of colour from European history.
Her novel Blonde Roots is a satire that inverts the history of the transatlantic slave trade and replaces it with a universe where Africans enslave Europeans. Blonde Roots won the Orange Youth Panel Award and Big Red Read Award. Evaristo's other books include the verse novel Lara, which fictionalised the multiple cultural strands of her family history going back over 150 years as well as her mixed-race London childhood. This won the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1998. Her novella Hello Mum was chosen as "The Big Read" for the County of Suffolk, and adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2012.
As an editor, she guest-edited the September 2014 issue of Mslexia magazine, the Poetry Society of Great Britain's centenary winter issue of Poetry Review, titled "Offending Frequencies"; a special issue of Wasafiri magazine called Black Britain: Beyond Definition, with poet Karen McCarthy-Woolf; Ten, an anthology of Black and Asian poets, with poet Daljit Nagra and in 2007, she co-edited the New Writing Anthology NW15. She was also editor of FrontSeat intercultural magazine in the 1990s, and one of the editors of Black Women Talk Poetry anthology, Britain's first such substantial anthology, featuring among its 20 poets Jackie Kay, Dorothea Smartt and Adjoa Andoh.
Her 2014 novel was Mr Loverman, about a septuagenarian Caribbean Londoner who is a closet homosexual and considering his options after a 50-year marriage to his wife. It won the Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. In 2015 she wrote and presented a two-part BBC Radio 4 documentary, Fiery Inspiration – on Amiri Baraka and his influence on her generation of writers.
She is a contributor to New Daughters of Africa: An international anthology of writing by women of African descent, edited by Margaret Busby.
Evaristo's most recent novel, Girl, Woman, Other, is an innovative polyvocal "fusion fiction" about 12 primarily black British womxn. Their ages span 19 to 93 and they are a mix of cultural backgrounds, sexualities, classes and geographies, and the novel charts their hopes, struggles and intersecting lives. In July 2019 the novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize. The novel was on the Booker Prize shortlist announced on 3 September 2019, alongside books by Margaret Atwood, Lucy Ellmann, Chigozie Obioma, Salman Rushdie and Elif Shafak, and on 14 October won the prize jointly with Atwood's The Testaments. The win made her the first black woman and first black British author to win the prize. Girl, Woman, Other was shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. The novel was chosen by former US President Barack Obama as one of his 19 favourite books of 2019.

Teaching and touring

Other than at Brunel, Evaristo has taught creative writing since 1994. She has also been awarded many writing fellowships and residencies including the Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 2015; for the British Council at Georgetown University, Washington DC; Barnard College/ Columbia University, New York; University of the Western Cape, South Africa; the Virginia Arts Festival, and Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, UK. She taught the University of East Anglia-Guardian "How to Tell a Story" course for four seasons in London up to 2015.
Since 1997, she has accepted more than 150 international invitations as a writer. These involve writer-residencies and visiting fellowships, British Council tours, book tours, teaching creative writing courses and workshops as well as keynotes, talks and panels at many conferences and literary festivals. She chaired the 32nd and 33rd in 2017 and 2018. She has also toured the UK and regularly hosts and chairs events.

Critic and advocate

Evaristo has written many book reviews for UK publications, including The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman. Aside from founding the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, in 2012 she was chair of judges for both the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
She has also judged many other literary prizes including the Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition, Costa Book Awards, the Goldsmiths Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, Orange Award for New Writers and Next Generation Poets. She is on the board of the African Poetry Book Fund in the US, and judges all their prizes. She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize. In 2019 she is the judge of the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and the Polari Book Prize.
In 2006, Evaristo initiated an Arts Council-funded report delivered by Spread the Word writer development agency into why black and Asian poets were not getting published in the UK, which revealed that less than 1% of all published poetry is by non-whites.
When the report was published, she then initiated The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, with Nathalie Teitler and Spread the Word. Thirty poets were mentored, each over a one- or two-year period, and many are publishing books, winning many awards and receiving huge acclaim for their poetry.
Evaristo has also served on many key councils and advisory committees for various organisations including the Council of the Royal Society of Literature since 2017, the Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, the British Council Literature Advisory Panel, the Society of Authors, the Poetry Society and Wasafiri international literature magazine.
In the 1980s, together with Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire, she founded Theatre of Black Women, the first theatre company in Britain of its kind. In the 1990s she organised Britain's first black British writing conference, held at the Museum of London, and also Britain's first black British theatre conference, held at the Royal Festival Hall. In 1995 she co-founded and directed Spread the Word, London's writer development agency.
Upon winning the Booker Prize, Evaristo dismissed the concept of cultural appropriation, stating that it is ridiculous to expect writers not to “write beyond your own culture.”

Honours, awards, fellowships