British · b. 1959
Bernardine Evaristo is a British novelist who co-won the 2019 Booker Prize and whose genre-bending verse fiction celebrates Black British lives with warmth, wit, and formal invention.
Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, London, to a Nigerian father and English mother, and her fiction has always been animated by the full complexity of that identity — the layered, contested, historically freighted experience of being Black and British. She has been writing and publishing since the 1990s, producing a body of work that is formally inventive, politically engaged, and consistently warmer and funnier than those adjectives might suggest. Her characteristic mode, which she calls “fusion fiction,” blends verse and prose into a form that moves with unusual speed and intimacy.
Girl, Woman, Other (2019) is her most celebrated novel and the work that won her the Booker Prize — shared, controversially, with Margaret Atwood — making her the first Black woman to receive the award. The novel follows twelve interconnected Black British women across decades and social positions, from a radical theater director in London to a mixed-race woman raised on a farm in County Durham, weaving their lives together in a structure that is both formally daring and deeply readable. Its energy is celebratory even when its material is painful. Earlier works illuminate the range of her imagination: Blonde Roots (2008) inverts the transatlantic slave trade so that white Europeans are enslaved by Black Africans, using satirical fabulation to defamiliarize a history that has become too easy to think we understand; Mr. Loverman (2013) follows an elderly Antiguan-British man who has been secretly gay his entire adult life.
Beyond fiction, Evaristo has worked for decades to diversify British literary culture, founding the journal Mslexia and championing underrepresented writers at every level. Her memoir and craft guide Manifesto (2021) is an excellent companion to the novels — generous, direct, and genuinely useful to anyone interested in how a literary life is built from scratch.
by Bernardine Evaristo
Twelve interconnected characters — most of them Black British women — navigate love, work, identity, and belonging across several decades and social positions, from a theatre director's opening night to a ninety-three-year-old farmer in County Durham, in Evaristo's signature flowing prose-poetry.
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by Bernardine Evaristo
Barrington Jedidiah Walker, a seventy-four-year-old Antiguan-born Hackney councillor, has been secretly in love with his lifelong best friend Morris for sixty years — a secret maintained through a performance of Caribbean patriarch masculinity and a marriage that has made his wife Carmel miserable for decades.
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by Bernardine Evaristo
A satirical counterfactual in which Africans enslaved Europeans — a white woman narrates her life in bondage in a world where the Atlantic slave trade ran in reverse, forcing a direct confrontation with the mechanics and logic of slavery.
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Where to start with Bernardine Evaristo — whether to begin with Girl, Woman, Other, Mr Loverman, or Blonde Roots. A complete reading guide to her novels.
list
All Bernardine Evaristo books in order — from her debut poetry to Girl, Woman, Other. Reading guide for the Booker Prize-winning author's complete works.
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