Professor Bernardine Evaristo
Professor - Creative Writing

Summary

Professor Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker Prize 2019 for her novel, Girl, Woman, Other (Penguin), which has sold over a million copies. It also won the British Book Award for Best Fiction and Author of the Year (2020) and the Indie Book Award (2020), and it received many other awards and honours. It is an international bestseller, and was a Barack Obama 'Top 19 Book for 2019'. It was a Sunday Times 'Book of the Decade' and a 'Book That Defined the Decade' for the Guardian. The novel was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller for five weeks, staying in the Top 10 for 44 weeks. Her books have been published in over forty languages. She is one of approx 50 black women professors out of a national professoriate of 23,000. And one of only two writers teaching in British universities who have won the Booker Prize.

Her award-winning novel Mr Loverman (2013) became a hit BBC One eight-part television series in 2024, with a rare 100% Rotten Tomatoes (the critics & audience response aggregator) rating.

Her writing is focused on African diaspora interests and is characterised by unique temporal, spatial and stylistic experiments that test the borders of genre. She has three more books & many other major writing projects and adaptations forthcoming over the next four years.

Her books include Manifesto: On Never Giving Up  (Penguin, 2021) and Look Again: Feminism (Tate Publishing, 2021). Her other books of fiction and verse fiction include Hello Mum (Penguin, 2010), Lara (Bloodaxe 2009), Blonde Roots (Penguin 2008) and The Emperor’s Babe (Penguin 2001). Her writing spans drama and other writing for BBC Radio 3 & 4, as well as short fiction, poetry, memoir, theatre drama and essays. She spent over two decades until 2019 reviewing books for the national newspapers and magazines, including the Times, Guardian, New Statesman, TLS and Independent. She has edited and guest-edited several publications and magazines including Britain's leading poetry journal, Poetry Review, Wasafiri and the Sunday Times STYLE magazine in July 2020, with a black women takeover. 

One of Britain's most in-demand writers she has completed over 170 international invitations since 1996 to present her work and ideas, which has involved touring to the world's leading literature festivals and other literary events, and she frequently appears at literary festivals and events in Britain. She is also a keynote speaker delivering talks & annual lectures, often for the most prestigious organisations such as the British Academy (2023), the Bodleian Library Annual Lecture at the University of Oxford (2023) and the Gresham College Annual Lecture (2024).

She has chaired many literary prizes including the Global Black Women's Manuscript Prize (2024), the Women's Prize for Fiction (2022); the Forward Prizes for Poetry (books) & the Nero Gold Award - chairing both in 2023; the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribean Literature - chairing in 2023; and chairing the Global Black Women's Non-Fiction Manuscript Prize (2024). She founded the hugely successful The Complete Works poetry development scheme for poets of colour, 2007-2017 (many of its 30 alumni are now the leading UK poets of today, winning most of the UK's poetry prizes multiple times) and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2012-2022, founded to develop African poetry and setting in motion the careers of its winner who are now publishing multiple books. It's now renamed the Evaristo African Poetry Prize and is run by the African Poetry Book Fund.

She has been the Sky Arts Literature Ambassador and is currently the Literature Mentor for the Rolex Mentor & Protege Initiative (2022-2024). She is also the curator of the groundbreaking 'Black Britain: Writing Back' series with Penguin Random House, republishing books from the past, and snce 2021, thirteen books have been republished with an introduction by Professor Evaristo. Her first career was in theatre, studying at the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, and co-founding Theatre of Black Women (1982-1988), and she later earned her PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London

She has been the subject of the two iconic UK documentary series: Imagine with Alan Yentob (BBC, 2020) and The Southbank Show with Melvyn Bragg (Sky Arts, 2021).

At Brunel University she has received the following awards: CBASS Lecturer of the Year Award (2022); Vice Chancellor's Award for Staff (2020); Teach Brunel Awards: Best Small Module Awards (2017); CBASS Award for Excellence (2015). From 2014-2018 she was Public Orator for the University.

Bernardine has received over 80 other awards, honours and nominations. In 2024 she recieved the Praeses Elit Award from Trinity College Dublin, the Fair Saturday Award from the Fair Saturday Foundation in Bilbao, Spain, and she made the 'UK Black Powerlist 100' for a fourth consecutive year. In 2020, she made the seminal '100 Great Black Britons' list. She received the Black Excellence Award for Outstanding Contribution to Literature (2023); she was a Forbes '50 over 50' honoree (2022); she made The Bookseller's Powerlist (2019, 2021, 2022) -  named their pretigious 'Person of the Year' in 2022. She was No 26 on the Sky Arts  list of Britain's Most Influential Artists of the Past 50 Years in 2022 and her novel, Girl, Woman, Other was chosen as one of 70 books to celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee in 2022.  She has to date received ten honorary doctorates and Fellowships from universities and in total her books have received over sixty-five 'book of the year' honours in the press and media.

Other honours include being appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She became Vice Chair of its Council, and was then appointed a lifetime Vice President in 2020. She was then appinted President, 2022-2026, the second woman and the first person of colour to receive this honour since the RSL was founded in 1820.

She is also an International Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; an Honorary Fellow of the English Association, an Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford. From 2020-2024 she was President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, her first alma mater.

In 2009 she was made an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for being ‘a major voice in the multicultural panorama of multicultural British literature’, and she received an OBE in 2020.

For information on Bernardine's community advocacy, initiatives & projects, visiting her website - category Community.

http://www.bevaristo.com