LONDON – Bernardine Evaristo doesn't like boundaries.
For the Booker Prize -winning novelist, rules about genre, grammar or what a working-class biracial woman can achieve are all to be challenged and swept away.
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Evaristo was announced Wednesday as recipient of the 100,000-pound ($135,000) Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award for her “transformative impact on literature and her unwavering dedication to uplifting under-represented voices."
Evaristo, 66, received the prize both for her work to help promote women and writers of color, and for writing that takes in poetry, a memoir and seven novels including the Booker-winning “Girl, Woman, Other.”
“I just go wherever my imagination takes me,” she said. “I didn’t want to write the kind of novels that would take you on a predictable emotional or moral journey.”
An eclectic output
Evaristo had already explored autobiographical fiction, historical settings and alternate realities when she won the Booker in 2019 for “Girl Woman, Other,” a polyphonic novel told from the point of view of a dozen characters, largely Black women, with widely varying ages, experiences and sexualities.
She was the first woman of African heritage to be awarded the prize, which was founded in 1969 and has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers.
When she won, Evaristo was 60 and had been a writer for decades. She says the recognition “came at the right time for me.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have handled it so well if I was younger,” she told The Associated Press at her London home. “It changed my career –- in terms of book sales, foreign rights, translation, the way in which I was viewed as a writer. Various other opportunities came my way. And I felt that I had the foundations to handle that.”
Evaristo’s house on a quiet suburban street is bright and comfortable, with wooden floors, vibrant textiles and a large wooden writing desk by the front window. Large photos of her Nigerian paternal grandparents hang on one wall. Her work often draws on her roots as the London-born child of a Nigerian father and white British mother.
Like much of Evaristo’s work, “Girl, Woman, Other” eludes classification. She calls it “fusion fiction” for its melding of poetry and prose into a novel that relishes the texture and rhythm of language.
“I kind of dispense with the rules of grammar,” she said. “I think I have 12 full stops in the novel.”
If that sounds dauntingly experimental, readers didn’t think so. “Girl, Woman, Other” has sold more than 1 million copies and was chosen as one of Barack Obama’s books of the year.
Passion for poetry
Evaristo traces her love of poetry to the church services of her Catholic childhood, where she soaked up the rhythms of the Bible and sermons, “without realizing I was absorbing poetry.”
When she started writing novels, the love of poetry remained, along with a desire to tell stories of the African diaspora. One of her first major successes, “The Emperor’s Babe,” is a verse novel set in Roman Britain.
“Most people think the Black history of Britain only began in the 20th century,” Evaristo said. “I wanted to write about a Black presence in Roman Britain -– because there was a Black presence in Roman Britain 1,800 years ago.”
Another novel, “Blonde Roots,” is set in an alternative historical timeline in which Africans have enslaved Europeans, and was nominated for a major science-fiction award.
“Mr Loverman,” which centers on a closeted gay 70-something Antiguan Londoner, was an attempt to move beyond cliched images of Britain’s postwar Caribbean immigrants. It was recently made into a BBC television series starring Lennie James and Sharon D. Clarke.
Levelling the playing field
Her latest award is a one-off accolade marking the 30th anniversary of the annual Women’s Prizes for English-language fiction and nonfiction.
Women’s Prize founder Kate Mosse said Evaristo’s “dazzling skill and imagination, and her courage to take risks and offer readers a pathway into diverse and multifarious worlds over a 40-year career made her the ideal recipient.”
Evaristo, who teaches creative writing at Brunel University of London, plans to use the prize money to help other women writers through an as-yet undisclosed project.
She has long been involved with projects to level the playing field for under-represented writers, and is especially proud of Complete Works, a mentoring program for poets of color that she ran for a decade.
“I set that up because I initiated research into how many poets of color were getting published in Britain at that time, and it was under 1%” of the total, she said. A decade later, it was 10%.
"It really has helped shift the poetry landscape in the U.K.," she said.
Partial progress
Evaristo followed “Girl, Woman, Other” with “Manifesto,” a memoir that recounts the stark racism of her 1960s London childhood, as well as her lifelong battle for creative expression and freedom.
If Evaristo grew up as an outsider, these days she is ensconced in the arts establishment: professor, Booker winner, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, or OBE, and president of the 200-year-old Royal Society of Literature.
That milestone -– she’s the first person of color and the second woman to head the RSL -– has not been trouble-free. The society has been ruffled by free speech tows and arguments over attempts to bring in younger writers and diversify its ranks -– moves seen by some as watering down the accolade of membership.
Evaristo doesn’t want to talk about the controversy, but notes that as figurehead president she does not run the society.
She says Britain has come a long way since her childhood but “we have to be vigilant.”
“The country I grew up in is not the country I’m in today,” she said. “We’ve made a lot of progress, and I feel that we need to work hard to maintain it, especially in the current political climate where it feels as if the forces are against progress, and proudly so.
“Working towards an anti-racist society is something that we should value, and I hope we do, and that we don’t backslide too much.”