Bernardine Evaristo

Biography

Evaristo was born in Woolwich, south-east London, to an English mother, who was a schoolteacher, and a Nigerian father, who migrated to Britain in 1949 and became a welder. Her paternal grandfather was a Yoruba Saro who returned from Brazil to Nigeria and her paternal grandmother was from Abeokuta in Nigeria. 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. The fourth of eight children, Evaristo was raised in Woolwich. She was educated at Greenwich Young People's Theatre, Eltham Hill Grammar School for Girls, the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she earned her Doctorate of Philosophy. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London. She lives in London with her husband.

Writer/editor

Evaristo is the author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora. She notably 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 most recent work is 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. It won the Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction (USA) and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.

Her 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. This won the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1998.

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 couple driving across Europe to the Middle East, which featured ghosts 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.

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.

As an editor, she guest-edited the September 2014 issue of Mslexia magazine. Other editorships include 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). In 2007, she co-edited the New Writing Anthology NW15 (Granta/British Council). She was also editor of FrontSeat intercultural magazine in the 1990s.

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.

Teaching and touring

Evaristo has taught creative writing in a variety of settings over the years. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and she taught the University of East Anglia-Guardian "How to Tell a Story" course for four seasons in London. She has also been awarded many writing fellowships and residencies, including the Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 2015; 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. Since 1997 she has accepted more than 140 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 has also toured the UK widely and frequently hosts and chairs events.

Critic and advocate

Evaristo writes book reviews for several national UK newspapers, including The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and The Times. In 2012, she was Chair of judges for the Caine Prize for African Writing and Chair of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. 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 a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize. In 2012, she initiated the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.

In 2006 Evaristo initiated an Arts Council-funded report by Spread the Word writers' organisation into why black and Asian poets were not getting published in the UK, which revealed that less than 1% of all published poetry is by non-whites. When the report was published she then initiated The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, with Dr Nathalie Teitler and Spread the Word. Thirty poets have thus far been mentored and are already publishing books, winning many awards and receiving huge acclaim for their poetry.

She has also served on many key councils and advisory committees for various organisations including the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, the Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, the British Council, the Society of Authors, the Poetry Society (Chair) and Wasafiri international literature magazine.

In the 1980s, together with Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire, she founded Theatre of Black Women, Britain's first such theatre company, formed at a time when there were limited acting opportunities for black women in British theatre and film. 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.

Honours, awards, fellowships

Evaristo's books have been a Notable Book of the Year 13 times in British newspapers.

Academic honours