Bernardine Evaristo

British author Bernardine Evaristo was the first black woman and black British person to win the Booker Prize in 2019 with her novel, Girl, Woman, Other (Penguin UK, Grove Atlantic USA), as well as winning Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year at the British Book Awards, and many other awards. The novel was a #1 bestseller and has sold over a million copies in the English language. In 2021 she published two non-fiction books - a memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Penguin UK, Grove Atlantic USA) and a short book on art, Feminism (for the Look Again series. Tate Publishing) for Tate Britain: The National Collection of British Art, for their major rehang in 2023. The author of ten books, her writing spans long and short fiction, verse fiction, poetry, essays, drama and radio, and she is a longstanding activist for inclusion in the arts. She is the subject of two recent documentaries: Sky Arts' The Southbank Show (2020) interviewed by Melvyn Bragg and the BBC's Imagine (2021) interviewed by Alan Yentob. Bernardine is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London; Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford; President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance (2021-) and President of the Royal Society of Literature (2022-2026), the first person of colour and second woman to assume this position in its 201 year history. She was awarded an OBE in 2020.