Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of seven novels including Girl, Woman, Other and Mr Loverman. She has also written two acclaimed works of non-fiction including a memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up and Look Again: Feminism, in addition to numerous other writings that span verse fiction, short fiction, poetry, essays, literary criticism, journalism, and radio and theatre drama. Over her forty-year career, she has received over 90 awards, nominations, fellowships and honours. Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019 and was nominated for multiple other prizes, including The Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. An international bestseller, the novel spent 44 weeks in The Sunday Times top 10 in the UK and it is translated into 38 languages.  Blonde Roots was previously longlisted for the Orange Prize (the original name for the Women’s Prize for Fiction) in 2009. Bernardine’s literary criticism has appeared across many national publications, and in 2015 she wrote and presented a two-part BBC Radio 4 documentary, Fiery Inspiration: Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement. She has been the subject of two documentaries herself: The Southbank Show with Melvyn Bragg and Imagine with Alan Yentob.

Since 1997, Bernardine has chaired or judged 45 literary awards, including chairing the Women’s Prize for Fiction panel in 2021. She has also participated in 15 different literature committees and boards and chaired the inaugural Global Black Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, founded by Cassava Republic Press (2024). Bernardine was elected as President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022, becoming the first writer of colour and only the second woman to hold the position in the Society’s 200-year history. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University of London. In 2009, she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours and in 2020 became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). Both awards were granted for her services to literature. She has been included in the UK Black Powerlist 100 annually since 2021. Bernardine’s activism has always been focused on inclusion. She co-founded Britain’s first black women’s theatre company, Theatre of Black Women (1982–1988), co-produced Jackie Kay’s first play, Chiaroscuro (1985) and in 1987, co-edited the seminal Black Women Talk Poetry anthology.

More recently, she published Look Again: Feminism, a book on women in Art (Tate Publishing, 2021), and has written many articles championing women for publications including the Guardian, Vogue and The Sunday Times (for the latter she guest-edited a black women takeover of Sunday Times Style magazine in 2020). Bernardine has championed many women writers by writing introductions for new and reissued works and has curated a publishing series with Penguin, Black Britain: Writing Back, which rediscovers and celebrates pioneering books depicting black Britain that remap the nation. Bernardine has also written the introductions for the books in this series, alongside curating a separate list of black writing for Waterstones.