How Bernardine Evaristo Conquered British Literature

When the British author Bernardine Evaristo was in her early twenties, she and her drama-school friends would go to London’s theatres and heckle the performances. “It wouldn’t have been anything like ‘Rubbish!’ because it was a political heckling,” Evaristo, now sixty-two, told me recently. They would have been more likely to yell “Sexist!” or “Racist!” and then disappear, giddily, into the night. Recounting the habit this past December, Evaristo put on a mock posh accent and called it “appalling, appalling behavior.” The week prior, she had been named president of the U.K.’s Royal Society of Literature, becoming the first person of color to hold the position in the organization’s two-hundred-year history. (She is also the first who did not attend at least one of the following: Oxford, Cambridge, Eton.) Evaristo has some sympathy for her younger, angrier self. If social media had been around in her youth, she thinks she might have been one of what she calls the “Rabid Wolves of the Twittersphere.” “But we do need these renegades out there, don’t we?” she said. “We do need these people who will just lob a verbal hand grenade.”

Since 2011, Evaristo and her husband, David Shannon, have lived on the outskirts of West London, where she has dubbed herself “Mz Evaristo of Suburbia.” When I met her at her home recently, the doors to each room were painted a different bright color: blue, yellow, pink. Evaristo is tall, with a booming laugh. It’s been a long time since she has heckled anyone. These days, she sees herself as a diplomatic, modernizing force at the top of the British literary establishment from which she was long excluded. “The person I am today no longer throws stones at the fortress,” she writes in her new memoir, “Manifesto: On Never Giving Up,” which was published in the U.S. by Grove Atlantic last month. She used to laugh when people told her to think before she spoke. Now: “I’m so careful about everything I say.”

In 2019, at the age of sixty, Evaristo won the Booker Prize for her novel “Girl, Woman, Other”—becoming the first Black woman to do so—and achieved a level of success that seven previous books and years of grinding had failed to deliver. In “Manifesto,” she jokes that she is an “overnight success” four decades in the making. “Girl, Woman, Other” has sold more than a million copies in English, with deals in thirty-five territories and twenty-nine languages. Barack Obama named it one of his favorite books of the year. The screenwriter Russell T. Davies, who has considered adapting another of Evaristo’s books, “Mr. Loverman,” told me, “It felt so modern. It felt like today on the page.” The author Diana Evans said that the book “captures the multifariousness of identity in Black British womanhood.”

Since her Booker win, Evaristo has been named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and the president of her alma mater, Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance. For British Vogue, as a “Vogue Visionary,” she taught an online class on writing and was styled in a Dolce & Gabbana coat. For Harper’s Bazaar, she presented a Woman of the Year award at a ceremony surrounded by models and actors. (“I was pretty smart, but these people have their glam squad,” she told me.) A recent cartoon in the magazine Private Eye showed a radio blaring the BBC and a man shouting, “Quick! Bernardine Evaristo isn’t on!” In response, Evaristo tweeted, “I do find this funny, but I’ve spent 2.5 hrs on BBC R4 recently out of 1000s of broadcast hours pa. If people object, is it because I’m a black woman claiming a little space?”

“Manifesto” began to take shape during the interviews Evaristo did after the Booker win. “You’re reflecting on your life in a way that you don’t necessarily do when you’re just living your life,” she said. Each chapter explores an area that has shaped her work (“One: heritage, childhood, family, origins”; “Two: houses, flats, rooms, homes”). In “Seven: the self, ambition, transformation, activism,” she writes about the decades before she broke through. As the author Margaret Atwood told me, “She had been toiling in the salt mines of literature for a long time.”

She explores similar themes in “Girl, Woman, Other.” The book follows the lives of eleven mostly Black British women and one nonbinary character. The stories are bookended by the opening night of a play, “The Last Amazon of Dahomey,” at the National Theatre in London, written by Amma, a fiftysomething playwright who has long waited for recognition. Near the end of the book, Roland, a friend, reflects that she could have made her name a long time ago if she had pursued, say, “multi-culti Shakespeares, Greek tragedies.” Instead, Amma chose to write experimental plays about Black women that would “never have popular appeal.” Roland has found fame by aligning himself with the establishment, whereas Amma “has waited three decades before being allowed in through the front door.” “Although she hasn’t exactly been hammering on the castle walls for the duration,” Roland observes, “in truth, girlfriend spent much of her early career slinging rocks at it.”

Evaristo was born in 1959 in the South London neighborhood of Eltham, to an English mother and a Nigerian father, the fourth of eight children. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father a welder. The family soon moved to a rambling Victorian house in nearby Woolwich. She remembers an orderly home, with her siblings making their own breakfast and ironing their own clothes. They weren’t allowed to play in the street, perhaps for good reason: their neighbors called the children racist names and threw bricks through their back windows. When she was twelve, Evaristo accompanied one of her sisters to a youth theatre class in a deconsecrated church and took to acting right away. She wore multicolored sweaters, scarves, and socks that she had knitted herself, and made friends with the drama kids. She started speaking in a Received Pronunciation accent, like the BBC presenters at the time, which she picked up from a fellow-usher at a theatre where she worked. (“Would you like a programme?” versus “Do you want a programme?”) “I heard the difference for the first time,” she writes in “Manifesto.”

At fourteen, she decided to pursue acting, but experienced a string of rejections. She didn’t get into the National Youth Theatre, and instead got a job in the company’s café and hung around with people who had been accepted. At one drama-school audition, her mouth and teeth were inspected, “as if I was a horse or cow or, worse, an enslaved person,” she recalls in “Manifesto.” Eventually, she secured a place studying theatre at Rose Bruford College, on the outskirts of London, where she cut her hair short and began dressing androgynously. In 1982, she helped set up a small company called the Theatre of Black Women. If there weren’t any parts available for her and her friends, they would make their own. One play, “Silhouette,” told the story of a meeting between a contemporary Black woman and a woman who was a slave in the Caribbean two hundred years earlier.

Evaristo bounced between flats and relationships, some more stable than others. She left home at eighteen to move in with a boyfriend who, after discovering her in bed with a series of women, pushed her down a flight of concrete steps. At twenty-five, she entered into an abusive relationship with an older woman, whom she refers to in writing as “The Mental Dominatrix” or “TMD.” TMD once read Evaristo’s poems at a public reading as if they were her own. She kept Evaristo away from her friends and told her that no one could be trusted. When the Theatre of Black Women ran out of funding, she spent her savings travelling with TMD. They busked for money in Spain, collecting coins in a hat. One day, when Evaristo was thirty, she found herself selling jewelry from a suitcase in Dalston and wondered what she was doing with her life. She ended the relationship soon afterward.

In 1994, Evaristo published her first book, a collection of poems called “Island of Abraham,” with a small press. She had also begun working on a novel, “Lara,” which tells a fictionalized version of Evaristo’s own family history, including the story of her parents’ interracial marriage. Evaristo’s white maternal grandmother, a dressmaker with Irish roots, strongly disapproved of the union. “She was racist toward my father,” Evaristo told me, “but she also loved us.” Initially, Evaristo focussed mainly on her African ancestors. When she went to write the character based on her maternal grandmother, she came up against a block. “I was writing this white character, and I wasn’t sure if I could do it or not,” she told me. Eventually, she pushed past it. The portrait that emerges is unsparing, but ultimately compassionate. “I could never love darkie grandchildren,” Peggy, the character based on her grandmother, thinks. “But she’ll not listen to me or Father Augustus who said / that taking the word of the Lord to the primitives / is one thing, but it’s quite another lying down with them.”

Evaristo continued her literary experiments. “The Emperor’s Babe” stars Zuleika, a Black teen-ager who was forced into marriage with a rich Roman in a fictional version of Londinium, in 211 A.D. Zuleika is a “scruffy Nubian babe with tangled hair and bare feet,” sharply funny, and irreverent, who narrates her rags-to-riches story in a distinctly contemporary voice, as if she were parachuted in from an after-work gossip session in a present-day London pub. “Then I was sent off to a snooty Roman bitch / called Clarissa for decorum classes,” Zuleika explains in the prologue. Simon Prosser—her longtime editor, now the publishing director at Hamish Hamilton, who has also edited the work of Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy, and Deborah Levy—told me, “It’s in my top ten favorite books that I’ve ever published.” Still, it struggled to find an audience.

In 2008, Evaristo published “Blonde Roots,” which imagines an alternative world in which Africans have enslaved Europeans. Tonally, “Blonde Roots” is a strange creature, funny and disquieting in equal measure. It is told through the eyes of Doris, a white Englishwoman who is captured, sold into slavery, and renamed Omorenomwara because her captors find Doris difficult to pronounce. Brutal descriptions of the punishment Doris endures when she tries to escape sit alongside comic passages, including one where Doris repeats a morning mantra to herself in front of a mirror. “I may be fair and flaxen. I may have slim nostrils and slender lips,” she says to herself. “I may have oil-rich hair and a non-rotund bottom. I may blush easily, go rubicund in the sun and have covert yet mentally alert blue eyes. Yes, I may be whyte. But I am whyte and I am beautiful!” “Blonde Roots” was long-listed for the Orange Prize, but some critics found it over the top, and it failed to attract a wide readership. “My book sales for many years were so low that I never looked at the biannual royalty statements when they arrived,” Evaristo writes in “Manifesto.”

Some readers have found Evaristo’s brand of fusion fiction perplexing. She has a tendency to forgo punctuation in favor of more natural speech patterns. She mixes humor with the most difficult of subjects—slavery, prejudice, trauma—and happily combines eras and languages. She frequently invents new words, including the slurs used for the white slaves in “Blonde Roots.” Some critics have found the irreverence off-putting. A short review of “Blonde Roots” for this magazine, from 2009, called it a “dizzying satire,” but wrote that the book’s approach to the transatlantic slave trade “precludes any truly searching exploration of the psychological implications of such a traumatic historical event.”

Others find her humor refreshing. “When things become issue-based, they’re written as problems, they’re written as obstacles to be overcome,” Davies, the screenwriter, told me. “And she doesn’t write like that at all. She’s full of joy.” Elif Shafak, the Turkish British novelist, told me, “There are expectations that if this is your identity, you should be writing in a certain way. You should be writing a certain type of story. Whereas when you want to be free and more fluid and nomadic, it’s difficult. It takes a long, long time.” At the end of “The Emperor’s Babe,” when Zuleika lies dying, she thinks, while observing a friend, “Her expression read—how can you / be funny at a time like this? How could I not?”

In 2013, Evaristo was commissioned to write a short work for BBC Radio 3, in honor of the centenary of the birth of Dylan Thomas, the author of the poetic radio drama “Under Milk Wood,” which celebrates the inhabitants of a Welsh fishing village. Evaristo decided to apply Thomas’s symphonic concept to Black British women, who, like the Welsh villagers, are seldom seen in literary fiction. “Girl, Woman, Other” grew out of the commission. Evaristo spent more than five years writing the book. Originally, she had wanted to include the stories of as many Black British women as possible, but she eventually narrowed it down to around a dozen, whose connections to one another are teased out chapter by chapter. There’s a high-flying banker who works in the City, a bitter schoolteacher who is still waiting for a thank you, a radical lesbian building houses on “wimmin’s land.” There’s a trans influencer, a snobbish adoptee, and a supermarket clerk trying to turn her life around. Sometimes she reaches back into a character’s family history to tell the story of an ancestor, as with Grace, the nineteen-twenties-era mother of Hattie, a ninety-three-year-old matriarch living on a present-day farm in the north of England.

The book got off to a slow start. When “Girl, Woman, Other” was nominated for the Booker Prize, in 2019, it did not yet have an American publisher. It did not receive a review by the London Sunday Times until just two weeks before the ceremony. On the night of the awards dinner, Evaristo wore a hot-pink pants suit and a black tie. After hours of deliberation, Peter Florence, the chair of the judging panel, explained that two authors had been selected. “We tried voting. Didn’t work,” he told the guests. “We found that there were two novels, not that we couldn’t let go of but that we desperately wanted to win this year’s prize.” Atwood was announced first, and then Evaristo, who received an enormous cheer. “It was amazing,” Shafak, who was also short-listed, told me. Evaristo and Atwood embraced and held hands as they approached the podium. Some found the decision surprising: there had been a rule in place against splitting the prize since a 1992 panel couldn’t decide between Barry Unsworth’s “Sacred Hunger” and Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient.” Atwood told the audience, “I would have thought that I would have been too elderly. And I kind of don’t need the attention.” She turned to Evaristo. “So I’m very glad that you’re getting some.”

On a chilly day in December, I met Evaristo for a walk in Notting Hill, where she lived for much of her thirties. She wore a cherry-red quilted jacket and a bright multicolored scarf threaded through her curls. We walked toward the busy food stands and trinket stalls on Portobello Road. “I first came here when I was eighteen, and I just fell in love with it,” Evaristo told me. Woolwich, where she grew up, had been “dull and boring”; Notting Hill was bohemian, an “arty and scruffy” revelation. She was applying to drama school when she first visited, trying to figure out how to make a life working in the arts. “I didn’t want to be part of any kind of conventional society,” she said.

It took years to carve out the kind of life she wanted. In the nineties, she left an office job to devote herself to writing full time; she had cleared her apartment of clutter and eschewed a television so as not to become “a passive spectator of other people’s success.” After spending her twenties dating women, Evaristo found herself attracted to men again. She dated a poet with a display of condoms above his bed, a Chelsea banker, a junior doctor, and men who did not want to hold her hand in public. She found reëntering the hererosexual dating scene both easy (you could meet men anywhere) and bewildering (they didn’t always want a real relationship).