Bernadine Evaristo OBE

Bernadine Evaristo OBE was born in 1959 and is the first Black woman and the first Black British person to win the Booker Prize, which she won in 2019 for her book Girl, Woman, Other. She is the vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, a fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and a fellow of the English Association. In 2009 she was awarded an MBE, and in 2020 she was awarded an OBE, both for services to Literature. Girl, Woman, Other has received wide praise, appearing on Barack Obama’s list of ‘Top 19 Books for 2019’, as well as over thirty-five other ‘Book of the Year’ selections, including those from the New Yorker, the Financial Times and the Washington Post. The Guardian named it their ‘Book That Defined the Decade’. Evaristo has won many awards since her debut novel Lara was published in 1994, which won the EMMA Best Book Award, but she has gained much notoriety since winning the Booker Prize. Evaristo is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London. Out of the twenty thousand professors teaching in the UK, Evaristo is one of only twenty-six who are Black women.

There was some controversy surrounding her winning the Booker Prize, as she was awarded the prize alongside previous winner Margaret Atwood. Some felt that she should have won on her own, especially as she was the first Black female winner and the first Black British winner. She has since commented that although she completely understood why people had felt this way, she didn’t mind sharing the prize as she was elated just to have won it. She said she knew what the prize could do for her, particularly with regards to the platform that it gave her for her activism.

Evaristo was born in Eltham, south-east London, and was raised in Woolwich. Her father moved from Nigeria to Britain in 1949 and her mother was an English schoolteacher. She is the fourth of eight children. During her interview on Desert Island Discs, she talked about how she had been a ferocious reader as a child, spending every Saturday taking out books from her local library. She said that although she had loved books, she never felt the world had been telling her to become a writer. Growing up in a working-class community meant her career aspirations were for jobs that would pay the bills, and that she felt there had been no Black female writers for her to look up to. Despite being a keen reader, the theatre was her first love. She attended Greenwich Young People’s Theatre and went on to study at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama. In 1982, with Patricia Hilaire and Paulette Randall, she founded the Theatre of Black Women which was the first Black women’s British theatre company. The aim of the company was to produce plays written by and about Black British women, who at the time were almost non-existent in British theatre. As well as putting on productions, the company ran workshops for young Black women nationally and in Europe. The company ran from 1982 to 1988 when they were forced to disband when funding from the Arts Council was stopped.

Evaristo has talked about her time writing and working in the theatre in the 90’s, when she worked two days a week and this was enough for her to be able to support herself and spend the rest of her time writing and performing. She has said that this was made possible for her because during the 90’s London councils offered short term accommodation in buildings that were due to be developed but weren’t yet needed. Evaristo has stressed the importance of writers having access to affordable housing schemes like these that have allowed them to financially support themselves and have time to produce work.

Evaristo describes herself as a literary activist and she has set up numerous projects and schemes to help writers and poets of colour to get their work published. In 1995 she was one of the co-founders of Spread the Word, a London based writing agency that supports writers in order to give them the time, money and space they need to create quality pieces of writing. The organisation also works to increase the diversity of writers being published by publishing houses and other media. In 2006, through Spread the Word and with funding from Arts Council England, Evaristo initiated the Free Verse Report which found that in 2005 under 1% of poetry collections published in Britain had been written by poets of colour. From this report, Evaristo, along with Dr Nathalie Teitler, founded The Complete Works, a poet mentoring scheme for poets of colour. The scheme ran from 2007 to 2017 and mentored thirty poets. Each poet was mentored for around two years by some of Britain’s leading poets. The scheme has produced many critically and commercially successful poets including Ted Hughes, Award winner Raymond Antrobus, Forward Prize winner Mona Arshi, Inua Ellams who won the medal for Poetry at the Hay Festival in 2020, and Roger Robinson who won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2019. Evaristo has described the project as consciousness-raising. It not only highlighted those who were mentored, but also raised awareness of the absence of writers of colour in British publishing, and has encouraged publishers to seek out a more diverse range of voices.

During an interview with the Oxford Union, Evaristo was asked what inspired her to work towards the success of others, rather than to focus solely on pursuing her own success. She responded that she had grown up in a socialist household and that raising up others was part of how she had been raised. Her father, Julius Taiwo Bayomi Evaristo worked numerous jobs, from a welder to a shop steward, then to working in a factory. He was politically active, attending Right to Work marches in the 1970s, and in 1983 he became the first Black councilor in the Borough of Greenwich, for the Labour Party. She described him as someone who ‘fought injustice, on behalf of everybody’. Her mother was also active in the Labour party and was a trade union representative at the school where she worked as a teacher. Evaristo also stated that as someone with a platform, even the platform that she had before she won the Booker Prize, that bringing up others with you was an incredibly rewarding thing to do. She said she felt that it is important that alongside her own success that she is able to bring others up with her, and that her success does not necessarily mean that others will be brought up, so she works to make sure that they are.

Evaristo’s writes about experiences concerning the African diaspora, and she often experiments with narrative perspective and form. She has previously used speculative fiction to merge the past and present, blending facts with reality to create an alternative space, such as in her novel Blonde Roots, a satirical novel where the white protagonist is kidnapped and sold into slavery in an inversion of the transatlantic slave trade. Her first novel Lara is a mix of poetry and prose, and in her most recent novel Girl, Woman, Other she abandons full stops and instead uses line breaks to control the rhythm. Her novel Emperor's Babe is set in London in 211 AD and follows the life of Zuleika, the daughter of Sudanese migrants. The novel not only explores the hidden past of the Black experience in Britain, put positions it against contemporary Britain, as the London of 211 AD is still a space where conflicts concerning race, gender, and class occur. When imagining her characters, Evaristo has described how she is interested in their interior lives, who they are, what drives them, how do they begin and where will they end up. She says that focusing on the interior of a character helps her to create three-dimensional and recognisable characters, and avoid typecasting. Her narratives often explore race, not only pushing the boundaries of British writing with their form and content but also exploring what it means to be British.