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

Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is an English author and Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University of London. She is Visiting Professor of Creative Media 2025/6 at the University of Oxford. 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. The novel won many other awards inclu
"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."