Bernardine Evaristo

Author, activist, writer, professor, star of two BBC documentary series, President of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, the first black woman to win the Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo, meets the Athenian public for the first time in a discussion at the Main Stage. Born in 1959 to an English mother and Nigerian father, she grew up in London where she lives and teaches creative writing. After decades of working as an actress, teacher, singer, and activist, she stepped from the margins to the global spotlight. In her Manifesto, she talks about the racism she experienced since her childhood and the difficulties she encountered on her journey related to race, gender, social class, diversity, sexuality, and the passing of youth. In her eighth book Girl, Woman, Other – for which she was awarded the Booker Prize (2019) – twelve women living in Britain, most of them black or mixed race, of all ages, rich and poor, with different personalities and sexual orientations, have experienced social discrimination, racist behaviors, and everyday hardships from an early age. Their stories of friends, family, and lovers are woven together in search of a better future in an ever-changing multi-ethnic society.

Her name was introduced to the lives of the restless, informed readers around the world with the book “Girl, Woman, Other,” which shared the 2019 Booker Prize with “The Testaments,” a work by the remarkable Margaret Atwood. The book brought together the stories of twelve women living in Britain, through which the multiple faces of identity – young and old, mixed-race and black, rich and poor – came to emerge: All that can fit in Bernardine Evaristo’s literary universe, a universe of diversity, inclusion, and personal quests, addressed to an open society.

Evaristo is a voice of her time. On the one hand, her writing draws on her personal experiences of racism, family violence, and exclusion. Growing up in a “white” neighborhood of London, in an interracial family among many siblings, she learned how to fight for survival and against prejudice, always chasing her dreams and ambitions. From 1999 to this day, she has won a total of 77 nominations, awards, and honorary distinctions, including the 2020 Indie Book Award for Fiction and the British Book Award.

Her work conveys the invisible aspects of a world that looks well-tempered but still keeps ghosts in the closet. On the other hand, her writings speak for the voiceless; for the people who are constantly facing the obstacles of race, gender, color, sexuality, and/or social order. “Personal success is most meaningful when used to uplift communities otherwise left behind. We are all interconnected and must look after each other,” she says.

The questions she puts are whispered by every mouth but at the same time project the answers to the future: How do we raise our children in a multicultural society? How do we talk about injustice and racial racism? How do we stand by their “victims”? in her work “Manifesto,” Evaristo deposits her thoughts with writing craftsmanship and boldness – the same traits that define her book “Blonde Roots,” where she outlines an inverted history of slavery: What would have happened had the whites been the slaves of the blacks?

By setting an example, this British author of Nigerian roots proves that origin, social descent, gender, and color are by no means a destiny in which one is trapped. These factors also don’t render a person “invisible.” Taking to heart the principles of empathy and inclusion, she founded the Theatre of Black Women (Britain’s first black women’s theater company), established the Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and has also organized programs for the promotion and support of black writers. Her literature not only draws on reality; her work equally shapes reality as it is affected by it. More than a simple understanding of the world, Evaristo opts for change. “Creativity circulates freely in our imaginations, waiting for us to tap into it. It must not be bound by rules or censorship, yet we should not ignore its socio-political contexts. Be wild, disobedient and daring with your creativity, take risks instead of following predictable routes,” as she writes in “Manifesto.”