Bernardine Evaristo

"With all of my books Im interested in where people come from in relation to who they are."

"When youre a slave you dream / of either owning slaves or freeing them."

"Im not interested in any stereotypes whatsoever."

"I have a term I came up with called fusion fiction – thats what it felt like, with the absence of full stops, the long sentences. The form is very free-flowing and it allowed me to be inside the characters heads and go all over the place – the past, the present. For me, theres always a level of experimentation – Im not happy writing what we might call traditional novels."

"I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women werent visible in literature. I whittled it down to 12 characters – I wanted them to span from a teenager to someone in their 90s, and see their trajectory from birth, though not linear. There are many ways in which otherness can be interpreted in the novel – the women are othered in so many ways and sometimes by each other. I wanted it to be identified as a novel about women as well."