Kolkata: Bernardine Evaristo is very happy that she won the Booker Prize. She really wanted it, and when she was named co-winner in 2019 for Girl, Woman, Other, she was overjoyed. She has spoken of this joy in many interviews since, and also to The Wire, on the sidelines of the Kolkata Literary Meet 2025.
“I’m very honest and upfront about this. Many people have said to me, ‘Oh, you said you really wanted it.’ I did. Why bullshit?” she asks.
Evaristo is the first Black woman to win the prize. The book she won it for is her eighth. Through the course of the eight books, Evaristo took her status as the middle child of a 10-member mixed-race family, learnt all that there is to learn about life, became a theatre person, became an activist, wrote in a grammar that eschews all stuffiness, explored women characters of colour to their depths in her work, and infused her serious premises with exquisite, irreverent humour.
Through her twenties and thirties, she travelled without a care. “I was just travelling, I was free. I was just travelling by car across Europe with friends and all that,” she says. Now, she only travels when she gets an invite to a literary festival. In the past two-and-a-half years, there have been over 35.
“I was in Brazil in November, then I was in Mexico, in Australia, New Zealand, Bangkok, Colombia…When people send me these invitations, I am like, ‘Why not?’,” she says.
Although she has been to India twice before (2006 and 2023), this is her first time in Kolkata – hallowed old British capital. The English literature of Britain that many have studied and made their own in Kolkata is some shades different from the English literature that Evaristo writes in Britain. The Britain left in Kolkata is certainly not the Britain transpiring in Britain. This change is mainly borne by the likes of Evaristo who are willing to give colonial practices very little leniency in their writing. So slapstick is the satire that she once wrote a book set in a parallel world, of a white slave in Africa. In a whimper of a reversal of colonial language, The New Yorker headline a piece on her with the words: “How Bernardine Evaristo Conquered British Literature.”
Does she worry that she is writing a new history?
Canon
“We are raised to believe there is a single history and that is the truth of the past. But there are many histories and ways of interpreting the past, as well as many ways to create history. History is yesterday, right? So as a writer, I am rewriting history with all of my books because they all go back into the past in some way, and I am creating an understanding of our society, which will soon become history. So I do feel a huge responsibility for it,” she says.
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Two or three years ago, she says, she wrote about ways in which it is possible for an author to challenge the canon – something she does in small and big ways. Her Booker-winning book has few fullstops – “about 14,” she says. Most of her writing follows a syntax of its own, flowing in line-long paragraphs or however it pleases. Evaristo has named this form “pro-poetic”. It eschews rules, and the white male canon.
“It’s something I feel passionately about. I can’t shut up. I am a spokesperson, in a way. And I am listened to. And I have to challenge what I consider to be the inequalities in our society. People growing up in the colonies had one idea of Britain. But it was not the only Britain. When my dad came from Nigeria to Britain in 1949, he was surprised to see poor English people because ‘All British people were rich,’ you know. Of course, it’s nonsense. There’s a little brainwashing that’s gone on with the colonial enterprise,” she laughs.
Evaristo has written and spoken extensively about her family. After arriving from Nigeria, Evaristo’s father married a White woman, and together they had eight children, all 10 spending their days on the receiving end of casual and intentional racism and degrees of ostracisation. In interviews and in her own writing, Evaristo has spoken of how her father was constantly afraid for his children and how he never had conversations with them but only disciplined them, out of a fear that they would not grow up as British children if they knew too much about their Nigerian heritage. But she has also spoken of how in her childhood, her parents threw the doors of their large house open for parties in which they all danced to songs by the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti.
Jokes and a lack of jokes
Evaristo’s writing is similar. There is levity wherever there is the darkness of the past. Wherever there is talk of trauma, there is also silliness. “My [White] grandmother did not embrace my dad,” she said while discussing her family on the Kolkata stage, laughing slightly as the heaviness sat with the audience.
But last year, something emerged which Evaristo is not quite ready to joke about. In February 2024, the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is president from 2022, was criticised for, among other things, changes to the way it elects fellows. The criticism came from a crop of its older fellows.
Evaristo, the first Black woman and second woman ever to head the RSL, rolls her eyes. She says she doesn’t want to go too deeply into it.
“To become an RSL fellow is a wonderful honour, but no single group or demographic within the fellowship should feel they own it,” she wrote in The Guardian last year. Evaristo is also the first person who is not from the Oxford-Cambridge-Eton circles to be president of the organisation.
The RSL was also accused of not responding to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie as emphatically as it should have. Soon after, another line of controversy opened – the RSL’s magazine, Review, was scuttled at the last minute because a piece critical of Israel, a country engaged in airstrikes in Gaza that have been called genocidal, was to appear, it was said.
The RSL and Evaristo have denied these, while referring itself for investigation to a body that regulates charities.
“Don’t believe what you read,” she says. “Seriously, do not believe what you read.”
“I don’t want to get involved in it, but when you have a system in an organisation that’s 200 years old, that has been for only certain kinds of people, and then some others are allowed in, those people feel as if they’re losing something. That’s all I’m saying,” she says.
Does it get in the way of her writing?
“I had a great year last year. They can’t touch me. But what I objected to was them saying that I was in charge, like I’m a bomber. I’m only the figurehead,” she says.
The RSL has 700 fellows. Evaristo compares the allegations that a crop of new – and diverse – fellows were destabilising the institution to the “Trump madness”.
“It’s like, let’s say, you have an election in India and one person has a vote and then everybody says, ‘You, you’re the person responsible for this election,’ but all they had was a single vote,” she says. “It’s insane.”
A cottage in Kent
This may be an example of an outside problem that she does not let inside, but Evaristo is otherwise hugely happy to share her words, warmth, advice, opportunities – and her cottage in Kent – with aspiring writers.
Does she ever feel like she is giving a lot of herself away?
“I think it energises me. I’m a bit of a conundrum in the sense that I am a writer, so I have to spend a lot of time writing, which is a solitary activity, but I’m very aware and conscious of the wider context of how we operate in this world, and I’ve been an activist all my career,” she says.
Providing spaces for writers, and setting up schemes that are going to benefit a new crop of them, are some of the things she spends a lot of time on, alongside teaching at Brunel University of London.
“I’m very good at making sure I still have the time to do the writing and I don’t have other big commitments. I don’t have to look after an elderly parent. I don’t have children. I have a lot of time at my disposal,” she says.
Amidst the mosquitoes, a very long queue of fans wait for her signature on their books.
