Brunel University of London's Professor Bernardine Evaristo has today been awarded the Women's Prize Outstanding Achievement Award: a one-off prize to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction.
This is the latest recognition for Evaristo, the Professor of Creative Writing who has taught at Brunel since 2011, and is in reward for her entire body of work, together with her 'transformative impact on literature and her unwavering dedication to uplifting under-represented voices across the cultural landscape'.
Evaristo was the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize in 2019 for her novel Girl, Woman, Other, and an eight-part BBC drama series adapted from her novel Mr Loverman was broadcast last year, and won two BAFTAs last month. Her writing is focused on African diaspora interests and is characterised by unique temporal, spatial and stylistic experiments that test the borders of genre.
Among her many other achievements, Evaristo co-founded Britain's first Black women's theatre company, Theatre of Black Women, more than four decades ago. She was made an MBE in 2009 and an OBE in 2020, both for services to literature. In 2022 she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature – the first writer of colour and only the second woman to hold the position. And from 2012 to 2022 she ran the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, aimed at the development, celebration and promotion of poetry from Africa, offering the largest cash prize for African poetry in the world.
The Women's Prize Trust aims to celebrate and amplify women's voices; open up writing as a viable career for women from all backgrounds; and promote original work. The trust will present Evaristo with £100,000 prize money and a sculpture next week at a ceremony in London.
The novelist Kate Mosse, who chaired the panel who selected Evaristo for this award, said: "We felt that Bernardine Evaristo’s beautiful, ambitious and inventive body of work (which includes plays, poetry, essays, monologues and memoir as well as award-winning fiction), her dazzling skill and imagination, and her courage to take risks and offer readers a pathway into diverse and multifarious worlds over a forty-year career, made her the ideal recipient of the Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award.
"Significantly, Evaristo has consistently used her own magnificent achievements and exceptional talent as a springboard to create opportunities for others, to promote unheard and under-heard women’s voices and to ensure that every female writer feels she has a conduit for her talent."
In an exclusive interview with and published by the Women's Prize Trust, Evaristo said: "I think we’re living in a very difficult time at the moment, where it feels as if misogyny is on the rise and the patriarchy is trying to close the doors on women’s freedoms and feminism and liberation and all those things that we fought for as women for well over 100 years, if not more. And so the Women’s Prize is always a point in the literary calendar, the cultural calendar, where we can focus on women’s writing and support it and celebrate it and nurture it."
Evaristo commented that she was 'completely overwhelmed and overjoyed' to receive the unique outstanding achievement award, adding that she plans to put the prize money into a project to support other women writers. "It just feels right to put back in," Evaristo said. "We should support each other."
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