Bernardine Evaristo

Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.

Evaristo is a longstanding advocate for the inclusion of writers and artists of colour.

She was raised in Woolwich, the fourth of eight children born to an English mother, Jacqueline M. Brinkworth, of English, Irish and German heritage, who was a schoolteacher, and a Nigerian father, Julius Taiwo Bayomi Evaristo (1927–2001), known as Danny, born in British Cameroon, raised in Nigeria, who migrated to Britain in 1949 and became a welder and the first black councillor in the Borough of Greenwich, for the Labour Party.

Her paternal grandfather, Gregorio Bankole Evaristo (d. 1927), was a Yoruba Aguda who sailed from Brazil to Nigeria.

He was a customs officer.

Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo (born 28 May 1959) is a British author and academic.

Her paternal grandmother, Zenobia Evaristo, née Sowemima (d. 1967), was from Abeokuta in Nigeria.

Evaristo was educated at Eltham Hill Grammar School for Girls from 1970 to 1977, and in 1972 she joined Greenwich Young People's Theatre (now Tramshed, in Woolwich), about which she has said: "I was twelve years old and it was the making of my childhood and led to a life-long career spent in the arts."

In the 1980s, together with Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire, she founded Theatre of Black Women, the first theatre company in Britain of its kind.

She went on to attend Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, graduating in 1982,

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.

Evaristo's first book to be published was a 1994 collection of poems called Island of Abraham.

She went on to become the author of two non-fiction books, and eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora.

She co-founded Spread the Word writer development agency with Ruth Borthwick (1995–present) and Britain's first black women's theatre company (1982–1988), Theatre of Black Women.

Evaristo organised Britain's first major black theatre conference, Future Histories, for the Black Theatre Forum (1995), at the Royal Festival Hall, and Britain's first major conference on black British writing, Tracing Paper (1997), at the Museum of London.

Evaristo has received more than 77 honours, awards, fellowships, nominations and other tokens of recognition.

She is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

In 2021, she succeeded Sir Richard Eyre as President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance.

In 1995 she co-founded and directed Spread the Word, London's writer development agency.

This won the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1998.

It won an Arts Council Writers' Award 2000, a NESTA Fellowship Award in 2003, and went on to be 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.

Her verse novel The Emperor's Babe (Penguin, 2001) is about a black teenage girl, whose parents are from Nubia, coming of age in Roman London nearly 2,000 years ago.

Evaristo's fourth book, Soul Tourists (Penguin, 2005), is an experimental novel about a mismatched couple driving across Europe to the Middle East, which featured ghosts of real figures of colour from European history.

She 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 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, and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen's 2009 Birthday Honours, and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's 2020 Birthday Honours, both awards for services to literature.

Evaristo was born in Eltham, south-east London, and christened Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo.

Evaristo's other books include the verse novel Lara (Bloodaxe Books, 2009, with an earlier version published in 1997), which fictionalised the multiple cultural strands of her family history going back over 150 years as well as her London childhood in a mixed-race family.

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.

She founded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, 2012–2022, and initiated The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, 2007–2017.

Evaristo continued further education at Goldsmiths College, University of London, receiving her doctorate in creative writing in 2013.

Her 2014 novel Mr Loverman (Penguin UK, 2013/ Akashic Books USA, 2014) is about a septuagenarian Caribbean Londoner, a closet homosexual 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.

In 2015, she wrote and presented a two-part BBC Radio 4 documentary, Fiery Inspiration – about Amiri Baraka, on BBC Radio 4.

Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker.

In 2019, she was appointed Woolwich Laureate by the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, reconnecting to and writing about the home town she left when she was 18.

In 2022, she was awarded the "Freedom of the Borough of the Royal Borough of Greenwich".

Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, Other (May 2019, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK) is an innovative polyvocal "fusion fiction" about 12 primarily black British women.

Evaristo was vice-chair of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) and in 2020 she became a lifetime vice-president, before becoming the RSL's president (2022–2026).