Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo (born 28 May 1959) is an English author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820. Evaristo is a longstanding advocate for the inclusion of writers and artists. In 2024 she founded the RSL Scriptorium Awards, offering struggling UK writers 'a place to write' on the Kent coast for up to a month each, in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. She founded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, 2012–2022, which in 2023 became the Evaristo African Poetry Prize with the African Poetry Book Fund, and she initiated The Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour, 2007–2017. She co-founded Spread the Word writer development agency with Ruth Borthwick (1995–present) and Britain's first black women's theatre company (1982–1988), Theatre of Black Women. Evaristo organised Britain's first major black theatre conference, Future Histories, for the Black Theatre Forum (1995), at the Royal Festival Hall, and Britain's first major conference on black British writing, Tracing Paper (1997), at the Museum of London. Evaristo has received more than 80 honours, awards, fellowships, nominations and other tokens of recognition. She is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2021, she succeeded Sir Richard Eyre as President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, completing her four-year tenure in 2024 and succeeded by the actor Ray Fearon. Evaristo was vice-chair of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) and in 2020 she became a lifetime vice-president, before becoming the RSL's president (2022–2026). She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen's 2009 Birthday Honours, and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's 2020 Birthday Honours, both awards for services to literature.

Early life and career

Evaristo was born in Eltham, south-east London, and christened Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo. She was raised in Woolwich, the fourth of eight children born to an English mother, Jacqueline M. Brinkworth, of English, Irish and German heritage, who was a schoolteacher, and a Nigerian father, Julius Taiwo Bayomi Evaristo (1927–2001), known as Danny, born in British Cameroon, raised in Nigeria, who migrated to Britain in 1949 and became a welder and the first black councillor in the Borough of Greenwich, for the Labour Party. Her paternal grandfather, Gregorio Bankole Evaristo (d. 1927), was a Yoruba Aguda who sailed from Brazil to Nigeria. He was a customs officer. Her paternal grandmother, Zenobia Evaristo, née Sowemima (d. 1967), was from Abeokuta in Nigeria. Evaristo was educated at Eltham Hill Grammar School for Girls from 1970 to 1977, and in 1972 she joined Greenwich Young People's Theatre (now Tramshed, in Woolwich), about which she has said: "I was twelve years old and it was the making of my childhood and led to a life-long career spent in the arts." She went on to attend Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, graduating in 1982. 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. Evaristo continued further education at Goldsmiths College, University of London, receiving 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. In 2022, she was awarded the "Freedom of the Borough of the Royal Borough of Greenwich".

Writing

Evaristo's first book to be published was a 1994 collection of poems called Island of Abraham (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press). She went on to become the author of two non-fiction books, and eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora. She 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 (as in her 2008 novel Blonde Roots). Her verse novel The Emperor's Babe (Penguin, 2001) is about a black teenage girl, whose parents are from Nubia, coming of age in Roman London nearly 2,000 years ago. It won an Arts Council Writers' Award 2000, a NESTA Fellowship Award in 2003, and went on to be 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. Evaristo's fourth book, Soul Tourists (Penguin, 2005), is an experimental novel 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 (Penguin, 2008) 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, and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Evaristo's other books include the verse novel Lara (Bloodaxe Books, 2009, with an earlier version published in 1997), which fictionalised the multiple cultural strands of her family history going back over 150 years as well as her London childhood in a mixed-race family. This won the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1998. 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. Her 2014 novel Mr Loverman (Penguin UK, 2013/Akashic Books USA, 2014) is about a septuagenarian Caribbean Londoner, a closet homosexual considering his options after a 50-year marriage to his wife. It won the Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction (USA) and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. In 2015, she wrote and presented a two-part BBC Radio 4 documentary, Fiery Inspiration – about Amiri Baraka, on BBC Radio 4. Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, Other (May 2019, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK) is an innovative polyvocal "fusion fiction" about 12 primarily black British women. Their ages span 19 to 93 and they are a mix of cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, classes and geographies, and the novel charts their hopes, struggles and intersecting lives. In July 2019, the novel was selected for the Booker Prize longlist, then made the shortlist, announced on 3 September 2019, alongside books by Margaret Atwood, Lucy Ellmann, Chigozie Obioma, Salman Rushdie and Elif Shafak. On 14 October, Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize jointly with Atwood's The Testaments. The win made Evaristo the first black woman and first Black British author to win the prize. Girl, Woman, Other was one of Barack Obama's 19 Favourite Books of 2019 and Roxane Gay's Favourite Book of 2019. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. In 2020, Evaristo won the British Book Awards: Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year, the Indie Book Award for Fiction. In June 2020, Evaristo became the first black woman and first Black British writer to reach number one in the UK paperback fiction charts, where she held the top spot for five weeks and spent 44 weeks in the Top 10. Evaristo has been included on the Black Powerlist 100 for four years since 2020, which recognised the United Kingdom's most influential people of African or African Caribbean heritage. In 2020 she was included in the one-off, 100 Great Black Britons list. In 2022, Girl, Woman, Other was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors chosen to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. 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 (2001) and Hello Mum (2010), have been adapted into BBC Radio 4 dramas. Her ninth book, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, is published by Penguin UK (October 2021) and Grove Atlantic USA (2022). Her tenth book, Feminism (November 2021), is part of Tate Britain's "Look Again" series (Tate Publishing). She offers a personal survey of the representation of the art of British women of colour in the context of the gallery's forthcoming major rehang. In 2020 Evaristo collaborated with Valentino on their Collezione Milano collection, writing poetic text to accompany photographs of the collection by the photographer Liz Johnson Artur, published as a coffee-table book (Rizzoli, 2021). Evaristo has written many articles, essays, fiction and book reviews for publications including: The Times, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar UK, The Times Literary Supplement, Conde Naste Traveller, Wasafiri, and the New Statesman. She is a contributor to New Daughters of Africa: An international anthology of writing by women of African descent (Myriad Editions, 2019), edited by Margaret Busby.

Editing and curatorial work

Evaristo guest-edited The Sunday Times Style magazine (UK) in July 2020 with a black-woman/-xn takeover, featuring an array of young artists, activists and change-makers. A few years earlier, she was the guest editor of 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, 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). Evaristo was also editor of FrontSeat intercultural magazine in the 1990s, and one of the editors of Black Women Talk Poetry anthology (published in 1987 by the Black Womantalk Poetry collective of which Evaristo was part), Britain's first such substantial anthology, featuring among its 20 poets Jackie Kay, Dorothea Smartt and Adjoa Andoh. In October 2020, it was announced that Evaristo is curating a new book series with Hamish Hamilton at Penguin Random House publishers, "Black Britain: Writing Back", which involves bringing back into print and circulation books from the past. The first six books, novels, were published in February 2021, including Minty Alley (1936) by C. L. R. James and The Dancing Face (1997) by Mike Phillips.

Media appearances

Evaristo has been the subject of two major arts television documentary series: The South Bank Show, with Melvyn Bragg (Sky Arts, Autumn 2020) and Imagine, with Alan Yentob ("Bernardine Evaristo: Never Give Up", BBC One, September 2021). She has given many other interviews, including for HARDtalk, with Stephen Shakur (BBC World, 2020) and This Cultural Life, with John Wilson (BBC4, November 2021). She was also the subject of Profile (BBC Radio 4, 2019) and Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, interviewed by Lauren Laverne, in 2020. In 2015, Evaristo wrote and presented a two-part BBC Radio 4 documentary called Fiery Inspiration: Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement. Her many podcast appearances in Britain include interviews conducted by Adwoa Aboah, Samira Ahmed, Elizabeth Day, Grace Dent, Annie MacManus, Graham Norton, James O'Brien, Natalie Portman, Jay Rayner, Simon Savidge, Pandora Sykes and Jeremy Vine. In the two months following her win of the Booker Prize, Evaristo has written that she received more invitations to give interviews than in the entirety of her career.

Teaching and touring

Evaristo has taught creative writing since 1994. She has also been awarded many writing fellowships and residencies including the Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College in Hanover, 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 until 2015. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, having taught at the university since 2011. Since 1997, she has accepted more than 130 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 British Council Berlin Literature Seminar in 2017 and 2018. She delivered the New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize lecture on 30 September 2020. In October 2020, she gave the opening keynote address at the Frankfurt Book Fair's Publishing Insights conference, in which she called on publishers to hire more people represent a wider range of communities: "We have to have people working in the industry from all these communities who are looking for something beyond the cliches and stereotypes." Evaristo is the Literature Mentor for the Rolex Mentor & Protege Arts Initiative for 2023–2024 mentoring the Ghanaian novelist Ayesha Harruna Attah. Previous arts mentors since the programme began in 2002 include Margaret Atwood, Gilberto Gil, Philip Glass, Sir Peter Hall, David Hockney, Sir Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Spike Lee, Phyllida Lloyd, Lin Manuel Miranda, Toni Morrison, Jessye Norman, Yousou N'Dour, Michael Ondaatje, Martin Scorsese, Wole Soyinka, Julie Taymor and Mario Vargas Llosa.

The Complete Works

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 per cent of all published poetry is by poets of colour. When the report was published, she then initiated The Complete Works mentoring scheme, with Nathalie Teitler and Spread the Word. In this national development programme, 30 poets were mentored, each over a one- or two-year period, and many went on to publish books, win awards and receive serious recognition for their poetry.

Other activities

Aside from founding the RSL Scriptorium Awards and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, she has judged many prizes. In 2012 she was chair of the jury for both the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2021, she was Chair of the Women's Prize for Fiction panel of judges. In 2023, she chaired the Forward Poetry book prizes. In 2024, she chaired the inaugural Nero Gold Prize of the Nero Book Awards and the inaugural Global Black Women's Prize for Non-Fiction founded by Cassava Republic Press. Evaristo has also served on councils and advisory committees for various organisations including the Council of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) 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. Evaristo was elected as President of the Royal Society of Literature from the end of 2021 (following the retirement of her predecessor Dame Marina Warner), becoming the first writer of colour and only the second woman to hold the position in the Society's 200-year history, and she stated at the time of the announcement: "Literature is not a luxury, but essential to our civilisation. I am so proud, therefore, to be the figurehead of such an august and robust literature organisation that is so actively and urgently committed to being inclusive of the widest range of outstanding writers from every demographic and geographical location in Britain, and to reaching marginalised communities through literature projects, including introducing young people in schools to some of Britain's leading writers who visit, teach and discuss their work with them." As a Sky Arts Ambassador, Evaristo spearheaded the Sky Arts RSL Writers Awards, providing mentoring for under-represented writers. A portrait of Evaristo (2002) by photographer Sal Idriss is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Personal life

She is married to writer David Shannon, whom she met in 2006, and whose debut novel was launched in March 2021.

Awards and recognition

Fellowships and other personal honours

Lara (1997)

The Emperor's Babe (2001)

Blonde Roots (2008)

Ten (2010)

Mr Loverman (2013)

Girl, Woman, Other (2019)

Manifesto (2022)

Academic honours

Books

Plays

Short fiction (selected)

Essays

Editor

Literary prize juries

Voluntary advisory