The Booker Prize-winning novelist, Bernardine Evaristo, has never been one for boundaries; rules about genre, grammar or what a working-class biracial woman can achieve are all to be challenged and swept away.
On Wednesday, Evaristo was awarded the prestigious £100,000 Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, recognising her “transformative impact on literature and her unwavering dedication to uplifting under-represented voices”.
The 66-year-old was acknowledged for her efforts in promoting women and writers of colour, as well as her diverse body of work, which includes poetry, a memoir, and seven novels, most notably the Booker-winning "Girl, Woman, Other."
“I just go wherever my imagination takes me,” she said.
“I didn’t want to write the kind of novels that would take you on a predictable emotional or moral journey.”
An eclectic output
Evaristo had already explored autobiographical fiction, historical settings and alternate realities when she won the Booker in 2019 for “Girl Woman, Other,” a polyphonic novel told from the point of view of a dozen characters, largely Black women, with widely varying ages, experiences and sexualities.
She was the first woman of African heritage to be awarded the prize, which was founded in 1969 and has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers.
When she won, Evaristo was 60 and had been a writer for decades. She says the recognition “came at the right time for me.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have handled it so well if I were younger,” she said from her London home. “It changed my career– in terms of book sales, foreign rights, translation, the way in which I was viewed as a writer. Various other opportunities came my way. And I felt that I had the foundations to handle that.”
Evaristo’s house on a quiet suburban street is bright and comfortable, with wooden floors, vibrant textiles and a large wooden writing desk by the front window. Large photos of her Nigerian paternal grandparents hang on one wall. Her work often draws on her roots as the London-born child of a Nigerian father and white British mother.
Like much of Evaristo’s work, “Girl, Woman, Other” eludes classification. She calls it “fusion fiction” for its melding of poetry and prose into a novel that relishes the texture and rhythm of language.
“I kind of dispense with the rules of grammar,” she said. “I think I have 12 full stops in the novel.”
If that sounds dauntingly experimental, readers didn’t think so. “Girl, Woman, Other” has sold more than one million copies and was chosen as one of Barack Obama’s books of the year.
Passion for poetry
Evaristo traces her love of poetry to the church services of her Catholic childhood, where she soaked up the rhythms of the Bible and sermons, “without realising I was absorbing poetry.”
When she started writing novels, the love of poetry remained, along with a desire to tell stories of the African diaspora. One of her first major successes, “The Emperor’s Babe,” is a verse novel set in Roman Britain.
“Most people think the Black history of Britain only began in the 20th century,” Evaristo said. “I wanted to write about a Black presence in Roman Britain - because there was a Black presence in Roman Britain 1,800 years ago.”
Another novel, “Blonde Roots,” is set in an alternative historical timeline in which Africans have enslaved Europeans, and was nominated for a major science-fiction award.
“Mr Loverman,” which centres on a closeted gay 70-something Antiguan Londoner, was an attempt to move beyond cliched images of Britain’s postwar Caribbean immigrants. It was recently made into a BBC television series starring Lennie James and Sharon D. Clarke.
Levelling the playing field
Her latest award is a one-off accolade marking the 30th anniversary of the annual Women’s Prizes for English-language fiction and nonfiction.
Women’s Prize founder Kate Mosse said Evaristo’s “dazzling skill and imagination, and her courage to take risks and offer readers a pathway into diverse and multifarious worlds over a 40-year career made her the ideal recipient.”
Evaristo, who teaches creative writing at Brunel University of London, plans to use the prize money to help other women writers through an as-yet undisclosed project.
She has long been involved with projects to level the playing field for under-represented writers, and is especially proud of Complete Works, a mentoring program for poets of colour that she ran for a decade.
“I set that up because I initiated research into how many poets of colour were getting published in Britain at that time, and it was under 1 per cent” of the total, she said. A decade later, it was 10 per cent.
"It really has helped shift the poetry landscape in the U.K.," she said.
Partial progress
Evaristo followed “Girl, Woman, Other” with “Manifesto,” a memoir that recounts the stark racism of her 1960s London childhood, as well as her lifelong battle for creative expression and freedom.
If Evaristo grew up as an outsider, these days she is ensconced in the arts establishment: professor, Booker winner, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, or OBE, and president of the 200-year-old Royal Society of Literature.
That milestone - she’s the first person of colour and the second woman to head the RSL - has not been trouble-free. The society has been ruffled by free speech tows and arguments over attempts to bring in younger writers and diversify its ranks – moves seen by some as watering down the accolade of membership.
Evaristo doesn’t want to talk about the controversy, but notes that as figurehead president, she does not run the society.
She says Britain has come a long way since her childhood, but “we have to be vigilant.”
“The country I grew up in is not the country I’m in today,” she said. “We’ve made a lot of progress, and I feel that we need to work hard to maintain it, especially in the current political climate where it feels as if the forces are against progress, and proudly so.
“Working towards an anti-racist society is something that we should value, and I hope we do, and that we don’t backslide too much.”
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