Bernardine Evaristo Books in Order

Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, in south east London, the fourth of eight children. She grew up in a busy mixed-heritage family, with an English mother and a Nigerian father, and that sense of crossing histories, places, and identities runs through almost everything she writes.

The arts found her early.

At 12 she joined Greenwich Young People's Theatre, and she has often described it as the place that changed her life. She went on to study at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, graduating in 1982, and soon after co-founded Theatre of Black Women, the first Black women's theatre company in Britain, with fellow graduates Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire.

She started out in performance and theatre, but writing gradually became the center of things. After the company ended, she kept working in poetry and drama, and her first book, Island of Abraham, appeared in 1994. From there she built the kind of career that rarely fits one shelf, part poetry, part fiction, part stage work, part teaching, part literary activism.

That refusal to stay in one lane matters.

Her early books already show the range. Lara turns family history into a verse novel about a mixed-race girl growing up in London, while The Emperor's Babe drops readers into Roman Londinium through the voice of Zuleika, a sharp, restless teenager. Readers often come to Evaristo for the formal boldness, but they stay for the people in the books, funny, wounded, ambitious, contradictory, alive.

Blonde Roots flips the history of slavery to expose how power works. Mr Loverman is very different again, a funny and painful novel about an older Caribbean Londoner who has spent decades hiding his sexuality. Then Girl, Woman, Other widened her readership around the world with its linked portraits of twelve mostly Black British characters, and in 2019 it won the Booker Prize, making Evaristo the first Black woman and first Black British person to receive it.

Across her work, certain concerns keep returning. She writes about the African diaspora, about Britain as it has been and as it is, about people pushed to the edge of official history, and about love, race, class, gender, sexuality, migration, and belonging. She also likes to stretch form, mixing prose, poetry, multiple voices, and unconventional structure without losing the beat of a story.

Her work off the page matters too. She co-founded the writer development agency Spread the Word, helped launch the Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour, and founded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Teaching has been a big part of her life as well, and she has long been connected with Brunel University of London, where she is Professor of Creative Writing.

More recently, she has written nonfiction as well, including the memoir Manifesto and the short illustrated essay Feminism. She lives in London with her husband, and her career still seems driven by the same mix that shaped it from the start, curiosity, nerve, experiment, and a real determination to make room for more voices in literature.