Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo (born 28 May 1959) is an English author and Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University of London. She is Visiting Professor of Creative Media 2025/6 at the University of Oxford. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first black woman to win the Booker. The novel won many other awards including two British Book awards (a.k.a. "Nibbies"). In 2025, Evaristo was selected from among all previous Women's Prize for Fiction winners and nominees as the recipient of the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, a one-off literary honour to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction. She served for four years as President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first Black or Asian person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820. She was elected President Emerita once her tenure was completed in 2025.
Evaristo is a longstanding advocate and activist for the inclusion of writers and artists. She co-founded Spread the Word writer development agency with Ruth Borthwick"About Us" , Spread the Word. (1995–present) and Britain's first black women's theatre company (1982–1988), Theatre of Black Women."Theatre of Black Women" , Unfinished Histories: Recording the History of Alternative Theatre. Retrieved 29 July 2019. Evaristo organised Britain's first major black theatre conference, Future Histories, for the Black Theatre Forum (1995), at the Royal Festival Hall, and Britain's first major conference on black British writing, Tracing Paper (1997), at the Museum of London. Evaristo founded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize,Brunel International African Poetry Prize website. 2012–2022, which in 2023 became the Evaristo African Poetry Prize with the African Poetry Book Fund, and she founded The Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour, 2007–2017. In 2021 she founded the Sky Arts Mentoring Award for writers with the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) and in 2024, she founded the RSL Scriptorium Awards, offering her cottage as a place to write for 10 struggling UK writers a year on the Kent coast for up to a month each, in partnership with the RSL.RSL Scriptorium Awards, Royal Society of Literature. In 2021 she founded and became the curator of the Black Britain: Writing Back series with Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House, bringing out-of-circulation books back into print. Thirteen books have been republished to date. In 2025, she founded the RSL Pioneer Prize, to be awarded to a different woman writer aged over 60 every year for ten years, the first winner was Maureen Duffy in 2025. The Pioneer Prize is funded by Evaristo's donation of the £100,000 she herself won from the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award in 2025.
Evaristo has received more than 90 honours, awards, fellowships, nominations and other markers of recognition, and her books have been a "Book of the Year" more than 60 times. She is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2021, she succeeded Richard Eyre as President of Rose Bruford College, completing her four-year tenure in 2024 and succeeded by the actor Ray Fearon. Evaristo was vice-chair of the RSL governing council and in 2020 she became vice-president, before being announced as the RSL's president in 2021. At the end of Evaristo's four-year term, Elif Shafak was named in December 2025 as the RSL's new president.
Evaristo was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen's 2009 Birthday Honours, and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's 2020 Birthday Honours, both awards for services to literature.
Early life and career Evaristo was born in 1959 in Eltham, south-east London, and christened Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo.Harolds, Laolu (7 September 2019), "Two Nigerian Novelists Make 2019 Booker Prize Shortlist" , Nigerian Tribune. She was raised in Woolwich, the fourth of eight children born to an English mother, Jacqueline M. Brinkworth, and a Nigerian father, Julius Taiwo Bayomi Evaristo (1927–2001), known as Danny. Brinkworth was a schoolteacher of English, Irish and German heritage. Danny Evaristo was Nigerian but born in British Cameroon and raised in Nigeria; he migrated to Britain in 1949 and became a welder and the first black councillor in the Borough of Greenwich, for the Labour Party. Her paternal grandfather, Gregorio Bankole Evaristo (d. 1927), was a Yoruba Aguda who sailed from Brazil to Nigeria. He was a customs officer. Her paternal grandmother, Zenobia Evaristo, née Sowemima (d. 1967), was from Abeokuta in Nigeria.Bernardine Evaristo biography , British Council, Literature.
Evaristo was educated at Notre Dame Convent, Plumcroft Primary School and Eltham Hill Grammar School for Girls from 1970 to 1977, and in 1972 she joined Greenwich Young People's Theatre (now Tramshed, in Woolwich), about which she has said: "I was twelve years old and it was the making of my childhood and led to a life-long career spent in the arts." She went on to attend Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, graduating in 1982.
In the 1980s, together with Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire, she founded Theatre of Black Women, the first theatre company in Britain of its kind. In the 1990s, she organised Britain's first black British writing conference, held at the Museum of London, and also Britain's first black British theatre conference, held at the Royal Festival Hall. In 1995 she co-founded and directed Spread the Word, London's writer development agency."Arts Advocacy" , Bernardine Evaristo website.
Evaristo continued further education at Goldsmiths College, University of London, receiving her doctorate in creative writing in 2013. In 2019, she was appointed Woolwich Laureate by the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, reconnecting to and writing about the home town she left when she was 18. In 2022, she was awarded the "Freedom of the Borough of the Royal Borough of Greenwich".
Writing
Evaristo's first book to be published was a 1994 collection of poems called Island of Abraham (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press). She went on to become the author of two non-fiction books, and eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora."Bernardine Evaristo, Professor of Creative Writing" , Brunel University London. She experiments with form and narrative perspective, often merging the past with the present, fiction with poetry, the factual with the speculative, and reality with alternate realities (as in her 2008 novel Blonde Roots).Merritt, Stephanie (24 August 2008), "When slavery isn't such a black-and-white issue" , The Observer. Her verse novel The Emperor's Babe (Penguin, 2001) is about a black teenage girl, whose parents are from Nubia, coming of age in Roman London nearly 2,000 years ago.Kroll, Jeri (December 2018), "The Hybrid Verse Novel and History: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo revisioning the past" , Axon, Issue 7.2: Contemporary Boundary Crossings and Ways of Speaking Poetically. It won an Arts Council Writers' Award 2000, a NESTA Fellowship Award in 2003, and went on to be chosen by The Times as one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade in 2010,"The 100 Best Books of the Decade", The Times, 14 November 2009. and it was adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2013.The Emperor's Babe , BBC Radio 4, 23 May 2013. Evaristo's fourth book, Soul Tourists (Penguin, 2005), is an experimental novel about a mismatched couple driving across Europe to the Middle East, which featured ghosts of real figures of colour from European history."Extract from Soul Tourists — Analysis" , Crossing Borders.Adams, Sarah (16 July 2005), "What a trip" , The Guardian.
Her novel Blonde Roots (Penguin, 2008) is a satire that inverts the history of the transatlantic slave trade and replaces it with a universe where Africans enslave Europeans.Charles, Ron (18 January 2009), "Race Reversal" , The Washington Post. Blonde Roots won the Orange Youth Panel Award and Big Red Read Award, and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Orange Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Evaristo's other books include the verse novel Lara (Bloodaxe Books, 2009, with an earlier version published in 1997), which fictionalised the multiple cultural strands of her family history going back over 150 years as well as her London childhood in a mixed-race family.Bernardine Evaristo, Lara. at Bloodaxe Books. Lara won the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1998. Evaristo's novella Hello Mum (Penguin, 2010) was chosen as "The Big Read" for the County of Suffolk and was adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2012."Hello Mum", Afternoon Drama, BBC Radio 4, 3 August 2012.
Her novel Mr Loverman (Penguin UK, 2013/Akashic Books USA, 2014) is about a septuagenarian Caribbean Londoner, a closet homosexual considering his options after a 50-year marriage to his wife.Gee, Maggie (31 August 2013), "Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo – review". , The Guardian.Osman, Diriye (30 June 2014), "The Dazzling Story of an Older, Gay, Caribbean Dandy" , HuffPost Queer Voices. It won the Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction (USA) and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.The Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize , Jerwood Charitable Foundation. In 2023, it was announced that an eight-part television adaptation of Mr Loverman would be produced for BBC One. In 2025, the leading actor Lennie James received a BAFTA for his performance. In 2015, she wrote and presented a two-part BBC Radio 4 documentary, Fiery Inspiration – about Amiri Baraka, on BBC Radio 4.
Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, Other (May 2019, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK) is an innovative polyvocal "fusion fiction"Tepper, Anderson (13 December 2019), "The Little Book That Could: How Bernardine Evaristo Became an International Writer-to-Watch in 2019". , Vanity Fair. about 12 primarily black British women. Their ages span 19 to 93 and they are a mix of cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, classes and geographies, and the novel charts their hopes, struggles and intersecting lives. In July 2019, the novel was selected for the Booker Prize longlist,, then made the shortlist, announced on 3 September 2019, alongside books by Margaret Atwood, Lucy Ellmann, Chigozie Obioma, Salman Rushdie and Elif Shafak. On 14 October, Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize jointly with Atwood's The Testaments. The win made Evaristo the first black woman and first Black British author to win the prize. Girl, Woman, Other was one of Barack Obama's 19 Favourite Books of 2019 and Roxane Gay's Favourite Book of 2019.Wood, Heloise (30 December 2019), "Obama hails Girl, Woman, Other and Normal People as favourite books of 2019" , The Bookseller. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.
In 2020, Evaristo won the British Book Awards: Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year, the Indie Book Award for Fiction. In June 2020, Evaristo became the first black woman and first Black British writer to reach number one in the UK paperback fiction charts, where she held the top spot for five weeks and spent 44 weeks in the Top 10.
Evaristo has been included on the Black Powerlist 100 every year since 2020, which recognised the United Kingdom's most influential people of African or African Caribbean heritage. In 2025 she received their Woman of the Year Awards. In 2020, she was included in the one-off list of 100 Great Black Britons.
In 2022, Girl, Woman, Other was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors chosen to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.