Back in 2013, Bernardine Evaristo gave a reading in a south London bookshop from her novel Mr Loverman. Only six people showed up, a couple of them were dozing and she realised they were homeless people who had come to find somewhere comfortable to sleep. Last month, the hit TV adaptation Mr Loverman, about a 74-year-old gay Caribbean man set in Hackney, east London, won two Baftas, including leading actor for Lennie James, making him the first Black British actor to win the TV award in its 70-year history. “I checked Wikipedia!” Evaristo exclaims of this shocking fact when we meet in London.
Evaristo’s long career is one of firsts and creating them for others. In 2019, at the age of 60, she became the first Black woman to win the Booker prize – shared with Margaret Atwood – for Girl, Woman, Other, 12 interwoven stories of Black, female and one non-binary character. She is also the first Black woman to become president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) – only the second woman in its 200-year history, not to mention the first not to have attended Oxford, Cambridge or Eton. And this week she became the recipient of the Women’s prize inaugural Outstanding Contribution award.
“I became an ‘overnight success’,” she writes of her Booker win in her 2021 memoir, Manifesto, “after 40 years working professionally in the arts.” It is these now 45 years that are being recognised by this new award. Ironically, she has never won the Women’s prize, although she was shortlisted for Girl, Woman, Other. “This award more than makes up for it,” she beams.
The Booker judges’ decision to break the rules and split the prize between Evaristo and Atwood caused an outcry, with many accusing the panel of undermining the historic recognition of a Black female novelist. Evaristo was cheerfully unperturbed. “It couldn’t have gone better for me, to be honest,” she insists now. “I really do mean that. In terms of how it accelerated my career and gave me so many more opportunities and such a large audience for my work.” Girl, Woman, Other was on the bestseller list for nine consecutive weeks. Barack Obama chose it as one of his favourite books of 2019. Hamish Hamilton reissued her backlist. After being told for decades that there was no market for her work, she was suddenly in demand.
So much so that a 2021 Private Eye cartoon – now on her fridge – showed a guy exclaiming: “Come quick! Bernardine Evaristo isn’t on Radio 4!” Although she found it funny, there is an unmistakeable whiff of condescension. “Why notice me?” she asks. “When there are many people who are constantly in the media, who are not Black women. You notice the Black woman and suddenly it’s too much. You want us to be quiet and invisible.”
Tall and good-naturedly open, Evaristo is in no danger of keeping quiet or becoming invisible. Today she is wearing a hot-pink blouse the same shade as the trouser suit she wore to the Booker ceremony, her curls kept in check by a colourful headscarf. She is interested in power, how those outside the establishment can succeed without abandoning their own identities. “The headline is going to be ‘I want power!’” she hoots, as one not unfamiliar with controversy (the traditionally sleepy RSL has had more than its share of headlines under her tenure). “What do we mean when we say power?” she says seriously. “Influence, to have an impact, to effect change, to assume leadership positions? It’s so important that power is shared out.” Unlike the late poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who rejected an OBE, Evaristo accepted hers in 2020, arguing that not to do so is to risk enforcing the idea of “white honours for white British people”.
How does it feel to be at the heart of the establishment, to no longer be “throwing stones at the fortress”, as she puts it in Manifesto? “I still believe in what I believe in. I’m just much more capable and careful, hopefully strategic and able to have more of an impact than I did when I was in my 20s,” she says, reminding me that she has been professor of creative writing at Brunel University for many years now. “You go through an angry period – as you get older you can’t keep that up – but I’m still very alert to the inequality in the world, and also inequality in my industry. I am not there to endorse the status quo. I’m there to bring other people with me and to open the doors, always, to great talent.”
She has not just opened doors but built them where none existed. From the moment she graduated from Rose Bruford drama school in 1982 and co-founded the Theatre of Black Women with fellow students, the playwright Patricia Hilaire and director Paulette Randall, she has set about making things happen. Those early days were not just about creating theatre, she says now, but also work. “Because we were just so unemployable as Black women.” They put on Jackie Kay’s first play Chiaroscuro in 1986.
Since then, Evaristo has set up projects, mentoring schemes and prizes for under-represented poets and novelists. She has run workshops and courses, sat on judging panels (47, by her last count) and boards (“not something I necessarily want to do, trust me!”). Most recently, she launched the Black Britain: Writing Back series with her long-term publisher Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton, republishing 13 books by writers of colour since 1900. She plans to donate all her “huge” prize money (£100,000) from this latest award to an as yet undisclosed project to support other writers.
She hasn’t done all this because she is “saintly. Clearly not!” she laughs. Throughout our conversation, she is at pains not to sound like a “do-gooder”: we are here to talk about her outstanding contribution, I remind her. “If I’m asked to do something, I need to accept the invitation, so that I can make a difference,” she explains. “It is very important for me as a Black, British, working-class, now-older woman to acknowledge that really important position.”
The fourth of eight siblings, Evaristo grew up in “an activist household”, she says. Her Nigerian father was a welder who became a local Labour councillor, her mother, a devout Catholic from an Irish family, was a primary school teacher and trade union rep. Evaristo’s childhood in Woolwich, south-east London, in the 1960s was one of racial insults and smashed windows. Her father kept a hammer at the side of the bed for his whole life in England. The young Bernardine developed a “self-protective force field” that persists to this day, along with a determination to fight her corner – with words.
After leaving home for drama school at 18, her 20s were spent in a blaze of cigarettes and love affairs – with women – hustling for jobs and moving between the various short-term housing available in the 80s. “I really cherish that period,” she says. She has been straight for 35 years, and today lives with her husband in the outskirts of west London; she has swapped the Marlboro Reds and Drambuie for yoga and meditation.
In her 30s, before the boom in creative writing courses, she signed up for a personal development course. “My parents were not part of the elite,” she explains. “So they weren’t going to pass on to me strategies for how to succeed.” Evaristo was manifesting long before Instagram promised us we could live our best lives. The course made her realise “you can change big and you can expect the best. So why not go for that?” she says. She wrote a note to herself that she would win the Booker prize one day. The next three decades were spent working really hard to make it happen. “Nobody was waiting for me to publish books. Nobody was commissioning me,” she has said in a radio interview. “I just wrote on spec and hoped that somebody would publish me.”
Her first poetry collection, Island of Abraham, was published in 1994. Lara, a verse-novel based on her parents’ marriage, came out three years later. Then came The Emperor’s Babe, another verse-novel and her first with Penguin, which imagines life for a Black girl in Roman London. Soul Tourists, a zany road trip packed with Black ghosts from white western history; Blonde Roots, a satire that reverses the power dynamics of the slave trade; and a novella called Hello Mum, about a 14-year-old boy growing up on a council estate, followed. All her novels deal with the African diaspora in some way, mixing history, stylistic experimentalism and humour. “I’m always going for the difficult stories and to be subversive,” she says. “I’m always looking to find original ways into what I’m writing about.”
Mr Loverman “felt like a taboo subject”. Much has been written about the Windrush generation, but no stories that she knew of told a love story between two elderly Caribbean men. When it was first published, she was told it was “too niche” to be adapted for television, because its protagonist, Barrington Jedidiah Walker, “was Black, old and gay”.
While her reputation was steadily building, sales were not. She wouldn’t even look at her royalty statements when they arrived each year. Then, finally, her much-manifested breakthrough came. With Girl, Woman, Other she set out “to explore as many Black women in a single novel as possible”, ranging in age from 19 to 93, all with different backgrounds, faiths, sexualities and classes. Amma, a lesbian playwright, is clearly a version of Evaristo’s younger self. Once again, in a style she calls “fusion fiction”, she plays fast and loose with punctuation in favour of the rhythms of speech and thought. Here are the monologues of the silenced women Evaristo wrote for the theatre all those years ago.
Her Booker win coincided with a long-overdue effort to make publishing more inclusive. “George Floyd,” she says, when I ask what she thinks was the catalyst for this change. “There was already an awareness of it, but definitely the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter was a turning point.” Where once she knew every writer of colour in publishing, and could count them on one hand, she says, today she can’t keep up.
“Identity politics has always existed,” she says of today’s culture wars. “We just didn’t name it that.” Last year, she wrote a piece in the Guardian refuting the “false allegations” against the RSL and the rumours that she had swept in with “radical” new measures for appointing fellows, sidelining older, more established names. “It’s a great honour and a privilege,” she says mischievously when I press her for more. “There’s always this argument that if things diversify, standards are dropped.”
Evaristo even manages to bring positive thinking to our current global predicament. “Every decade, we are evolving. From my childhood to today, we have evolved,” she says. “We can’t do anything about America, but we can put up a fight in this country.”
Of all these achievements, what makes her most proud? “I feel I can enjoy the successes I’ve had of late,” she replies without hesitation, “because I know I haven’t kept it to myself.”
• Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the Women’s prize outstanding contribution award. www.womensprize.com.
