Bernardine Evaristo, MBE FRSL FRSA, FEA (born 1959), is a British author of eight works of fiction. Her latest novel is Girl, Woman, Other,[1] which jointly won the Man Booker Prize in 2019[2] and is shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2019.[3] Her 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[4][5] and the vice-chair of the Royal Society of Literature.[6][7]
Evaristo is a longstanding advocate for the inclusion of writers and artists of colour. She founded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize[8] in 2012 and The Complete Works poets development scheme (2007–2017).[9] She co-founded the Spread the Word[10], London's writer development agency[citation needed] (1995–present) and, in the 1980s, Britain's first black women's theatre company, Theatre of Black Women [11].[12] She also organised Britain's first major black theatre conference, Future Histories, for the Black Theatre Forum [13], 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.[14] Her paternal grandfather was a Yoruba Aguda or Saro who returned from Brazil to Nigeria and her paternal grandmother was from Abeokuta in Nigeria.[15][16][17] 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.[18] Evaristo was educated at Greenwich Young People's Theatre (now the Tramshed, in Woolwich), 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 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 eighteen.
Evaristo was a radical lesbian in the 1980s but she says that her sexuality changed subsequently. She is now married to a man she met online in 2006. [19]
Writer/editor
Evaristo is the author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora.[4] She notably experiments with form and narrative perspective,[4] often merging the past with the present, fiction with poetry, the factual with the speculative, and reality with alternate realities (as in her 2008 novel Blonde Roots).[20]
Her most recent novel, Girl, Woman, Other (May 2019, Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin UK), 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[21] and shortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize.[22] 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,[23] and on 14 October won the prize jointly with Atwood's The Testaments.[24] The win made her the first black woman and first black British author to win the prize.[25]
Her 2014 novel was Mr Loverman (Penguin UK, 2013/ Akashic Books USA, 2014), about a septuagenarian Caribbean Londoner who is a closet homosexual and considering his options after a 50-year marriage to his wife.[26][27] It won the Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction (USA) and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.[28]
Evaristo's other books include the verse novel Lara (Bloodaxe Books, 2009, with an earlier version pbd in 1997), which fictionalised the multiple cultural strands of her family history going back over 150 years as well as her mixed-race London childhood.[29] This won the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1998.[18]
Her verse novel The Emperor's Babe (Penguin, 2001) 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 she published Soul Tourists (Penguin, 2005), about a mismatched couple driving across Europe to the Middle East, which featured ghosts of real figures of colour from European history.[30][31]
Her novel Blonde Roots (Penguin, 2008) is a satire that inverts the history of the transatlantic slave trade and replaces it with a universe where Africans enslave Europeans.[32] Blonde Roots won the Orange Youth Panel Award and Big Red Read Award.[18]
Her novella Hello Mum (Penguin, 2010) was chosen as "The Big Read" for the County of Suffolk, and adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2012.[33]
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 (2012), titled "Offending Frequencies"; a special issue of Wasafiri magazine called Black Britain: Beyond Definition (Routledge, 2010), with poet Karen McCarthy-Woolf; Ten,[34] an anthology of Black and Asian poets, with poet Daljit Nagra (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) and in 2007, she co-edited the New Writing Anthology NW15 (Granta/British Council). She was also editor of FrontSeat intercultural magazine in the 1990s, and[35] one of the editors of Black Women Talk Poetry anthology, Britain's first such substantial anthology.
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.[36][37]
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 (Virginia, USA), 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.[citation needed]
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.[14] She chaired the 32nd and 33rd British Council Berlin Literature Seminar in 2017 & 2018. She has also toured the UK and regularly hosts and chairs events.[citation needed]
Critic and advocate
Evaristo has written many book reviews for UK publications, including The Guardian,[38] The Observer, The Independent, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman. Aside from founding the Brunel International African Poetry Prize,[14] in 2012 she was chair of judges for both the Caine Prize for African Writing[39] and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.[40]
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[41] in the US, and judges all their prizes. She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize.[42] 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[43] and Asian poets were not getting published in the UK, which revealed that less than 1% of all published poetry is by non-whites.[44]
When the report was published, she then initiated The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, with Dr Nathalie Teitler and Spread the Word.[9] 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.[45]
She 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 (Chair) and Wasafiri international literature magazine.[14]
In the 1980s, together with Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire, she founded Theatre of Black Women,[46] 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.[44]
Honours, awards, fellowships
Evaristo's books have been a Notable Book of the Year 13 times in British newspapers.[14]
2019: Booker Prize Winner, October 2019[47]
2019: The Gordon Burn Prize Shortlist, July 2019
2018: Elected a Fellow, Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance
2017: Elected a Fellow, the English Association[4]
2015: Triangle Publishing Awards: The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, USA[48]
2015: The Montgomery Fellowship, Dartmouth College, USA[49]
2014: Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize[28]
2010: The Emperor's Babe, The Times (UK) "100 Best Books of the Decade"
2010: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, USA (finalist)[50]
2010: Poetry Book Society Commendation for Ten, co-ed/ Daljit Nagra
2009: International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, nominated for Blonde Roots[51]
2009: Big Red Read Award, Fiction & overall winner
2009: Awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to Literature
2009: Orange Prize Youth Panel Choice for Blonde Roots[52][53]
2009: Orange Prize for Fiction, nominated for Blonde Roots[35]
2009: Arthur C. Clarke Award, USA, nominated for Blonde Roots[35]
2006: Elected a Fellow, Royal Society of Arts[35] (est. 1754)
2006: British Council Fellow, Georgetown University, USA
2004: Elected a Fellow, Royal Society of Literature[54] (est. 1820)
2003: NESTA Fellowship Award (National Endowment of Science, Technology & The Arts)
2002: UEA Writing Fellow, University of East Anglia
2000: Arts Council England Writer's Award 2000, for The Emperor’s Babe[35]
1999: EMMA Best Book Award
Evaristo is a longstanding advocate for the inclusion of writers and artists of colour. She founded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize[8] in 2012 and The Complete Works poets development scheme (2007–2017).[9] She co-founded the Spread the Word[10], London's writer development agency[citation needed] (1995–present) and, in the 1980s, Britain's first black women's theatre company, Theatre of Black Women [11].[12] She also organised Britain's first major black theatre conference, Future Histories, for the Black Theatre Forum [13], 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.[14] Her paternal grandfather was a Yoruba Aguda or Saro who returned from Brazil to Nigeria and her paternal grandmother was from Abeokuta in Nigeria.[15][16][17] 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.[18] Evaristo was educated at Greenwich Young People's Theatre (now the Tramshed, in Woolwich), 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 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 eighteen.
Evaristo was a radical lesbian in the 1980s but she says that her sexuality changed subsequently. She is now married to a man she met online in 2006. [19]
Writer/editor
Evaristo is the author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora.[4] She notably experiments with form and narrative perspective,[4] often merging the past with the present, fiction with poetry, the factual with the speculative, and reality with alternate realities (as in her 2008 novel Blonde Roots).[20]
Her most recent novel, Girl, Woman, Other (May 2019, Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin UK), 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[21] and shortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize.[22] 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,[23] and on 14 October won the prize jointly with Atwood's The Testaments.[24] The win made her the first black woman and first black British author to win the prize.[25]
Her 2014 novel was Mr Loverman (Penguin UK, 2013/ Akashic Books USA, 2014), about a septuagenarian Caribbean Londoner who is a closet homosexual and considering his options after a 50-year marriage to his wife.[26][27] It won the Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction (USA) and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.[28]
Evaristo's other books include the verse novel Lara (Bloodaxe Books, 2009, with an earlier version pbd in 1997), which fictionalised the multiple cultural strands of her family history going back over 150 years as well as her mixed-race London childhood.[29] This won the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1998.[18]
Her verse novel The Emperor's Babe (Penguin, 2001) 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 she published Soul Tourists (Penguin, 2005), about a mismatched couple driving across Europe to the Middle East, which featured ghosts of real figures of colour from European history.[30][31]
Her novel Blonde Roots (Penguin, 2008) is a satire that inverts the history of the transatlantic slave trade and replaces it with a universe where Africans enslave Europeans.[32] Blonde Roots won the Orange Youth Panel Award and Big Red Read Award.[18]
Her novella Hello Mum (Penguin, 2010) was chosen as "The Big Read" for the County of Suffolk, and adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2012.[33]
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 (2012), titled "Offending Frequencies"; a special issue of Wasafiri magazine called Black Britain: Beyond Definition (Routledge, 2010), with poet Karen McCarthy-Woolf; Ten,[34] an anthology of Black and Asian poets, with poet Daljit Nagra (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) and in 2007, she co-edited the New Writing Anthology NW15 (Granta/British Council). She was also editor of FrontSeat intercultural magazine in the 1990s, and[35] one of the editors of Black Women Talk Poetry anthology, Britain's first such substantial anthology.
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.[36][37]
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 (Virginia, USA), 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.[citation needed]
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.[14] She chaired the 32nd and 33rd British Council Berlin Literature Seminar in 2017 & 2018. She has also toured the UK and regularly hosts and chairs events.[citation needed]
Critic and advocate
Evaristo has written many book reviews for UK publications, including The Guardian,[38] The Observer, The Independent, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman. Aside from founding the Brunel International African Poetry Prize,[14] in 2012 she was chair of judges for both the Caine Prize for African Writing[39] and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.[40]
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[41] in the US, and judges all their prizes. She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize.[42] 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[43] and Asian poets were not getting published in the UK, which revealed that less than 1% of all published poetry is by non-whites.[44]
When the report was published, she then initiated The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, with Dr Nathalie Teitler and Spread the Word.[9] 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.[45]
She 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 (Chair) and Wasafiri international literature magazine.[14]
In the 1980s, together with Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire, she founded Theatre of Black Women,[46] 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.[44]
Honours, awards, fellowships
Evaristo's books have been a Notable Book of the Year 13 times in British newspapers.[14]
2019: Booker Prize Winner, October 2019[47]
2019: The Gordon Burn Prize Shortlist, July 2019
2018: Elected a Fellow, Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance
2017: Elected a Fellow, the English Association[4]
2015: Triangle Publishing Awards: The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, USA[48]
2015: The Montgomery Fellowship, Dartmouth College, USA[49]
2014: Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize[28]
2010: The Emperor's Babe, The Times (UK) "100 Best Books of the Decade"
2010: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, USA (finalist)[50]
2010: Poetry Book Society Commendation for Ten, co-ed/ Daljit Nagra
2009: International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, nominated for Blonde Roots[51]
2009: Big Red Read Award, Fiction & overall winner
2009: Awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to Literature
2009: Orange Prize Youth Panel Choice for Blonde Roots[52][53]
2009: Orange Prize for Fiction, nominated for Blonde Roots[35]
2009: Arthur C. Clarke Award, USA, nominated for Blonde Roots[35]
2006: Elected a Fellow, Royal Society of Arts[35] (est. 1754)
2006: British Council Fellow, Georgetown University, USA
2004: Elected a Fellow, Royal Society of Literature[54] (est. 1820)
2003: NESTA Fellowship Award (National Endowment of Science, Technology & The Arts)
2002: UEA Writing Fellow, University of East Anglia
2000: Arts Council England Writer's Award 2000, for The Emperor’s Babe[35]
1999: EMMA Best Book Award
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