The Booker Prize-winning author reflects on responsibility, craft, and how success can be a Goldilocks affair — not too early, not too late.
For the past few years, British author Bernardine Evaristo has lived in the rhythms of an ever-moving celebrity with her own planetary gravity. She has sold more
Some of this, she tells me over Zoom, sitting in the office of her London house on a sunny spring morning, is a result of the “Booker bounty”. In 2019, at the age of 60, clad in a hot-pink suit and a simple tie at a ceremony in the medieval Guildhall, Bernardine co-won the Booker Prize — making her the first Black woman to do so — for her ninth novel, Girl, Woman, Other.
The polyphonic work has a liquid-like flow, telling 12 stories narrated by 12 characters, mostly Black women, that are linked by blood (they’re relatives), by choice (they’re friends), or by circumstance (they went to the same theatre on the same night). It’s a sweeping, heady work that took nearly six years to write and that has granted her a senior place in a literary establishment to which she — and women of colour — had long been denied access.
But the timing, she tells me, was a Goldilocks affair — not too early, not too late. “A lot of people asked me at the beginning, ‘Oh, do you wish you’d won it earlier?’ and, ‘Do you feel that it’s a bit too late in terms of your career?’ It feels like, because I’ve been in the arts for 40 years before I won it, I had a really strong sense of who I was — of the kind of work I wanted to produce, of my creative practice — and so I feel that even though I’ve been busy and capitalised on this moment for me, I’m still rooted and grounded. When these things happen when you’re very young, it can be hard to get over. It can almost be a curse. Let’s say I’d won it in my 40s — I think that I still did not have the power that I feel inside myself at this age.”
As a writer, Bernardine is unabashedly malleable and highly alchemic, with a style self-described as “fusion fiction”. While she regularly explores themes about the African diaspora, covering subjects like race and sexuality, she is pointedly interested in humour and in the pulling of stories in directions she hasn’t been before.
That hasn’t changed, though as a private person, her bona fide sensation Girl, Woman Other has made her into a more open one. “I suddenly lost that need to protect myself. I found myself being very open about people, about things, about myself and my life.”
This — and the sense that she didn’t want to create something where characters would journey together in the immediacy of that epic — set in motion her most recent work, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (2022), and cemented her stewardship as a bard of burgeoning talent. It’s been variously described as a memoir-meets-manual, a self-help book, a chronicle of career advice, and a rallying cry. Bernardine simply calls it a meditation on “how my creativity has been shaped by my life, and my life by my creativity”.
Manifesto bears the structural hallmarks of her fiction, with chapters cataloguing a gamut of experiences (”One: heritage, childhood, family, origins”; “Two: houses, flats, rooms, homes”) to document who she is as a writer, where she comes from, and what she stands for. It didn’t need to be “great literature”, she explains, but it did need to be emotionally honest, because that would be its value.
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Advertise with NZME.“I wanted people to know that you can have so-called inauspicious origins where you are not expected to succeed, you are not expected to have a creative life, you’re not even expected to be ambitious — that you can come from that and have this journey to becoming a writer.”
I ask her whether she feels a sense of responsibility. “This idea of responsibility is an interesting idea, isn’t it? Because I do feel a responsibility as a writer.” In her craft, she discovered — and she hopes readers will discover too — that “the creativity has to exist for itself”. The joy of reading Manifesto is that it is as much a dishy, intimate insight for curious fans as it is about trusting the strength of your convictions.
As she says from her three metre-long Ikea desk that’s actually a dining table, where the view extends to a living room, then onwards to the garden, “If you have a creative life, that’s because that’s your passion, that’s what you want to do, that’s what you’re committed to.”
Bernardine has a novelist’s appreciation for a good story. “When we read literature — say, fiction, as distinct from other genres — we are being engaged in other people’s worlds and different points of view, hopefully. It’s a way in which we, the reader, can step into other people’s shoes, other people’s viewpoints, and be emotionally, intellectually and even spiritually engaged with it.” She gives the example that a work of fiction is a longer engagement than watching a one-hour film or a two-hour play. “It’s a serious commitment in stepping into another world, and understanding the world that we’re living in.”
The mechanics of good writing are serious too — a novel can take two weeks, or never finish — yet Bernardine, willful, determined, irrepressible, isn’t concerned about that. “If it was easy,” she says, “then why would I do it?”
Bernardine Evaristo will attend this year’s Auckland Writers Festival, from May 16 to 21. Writersfestival.co.nz
