Professor Bernardine Evaristo
Professor - Creative Writing

Summary

Professor Bernardine Evaristo has taught fiction at Brunel since 2011 at BA, MA and PhD level. She has supervised eight creative writing doctoral candidates as primary supervisor and examined eleven other creative writing PhDs. After studying for three years at the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance (1979-1982), she ran her own theatre company in the Eighties, before leaving theatre and publishing her first book, Island of Abraham, in 1994. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying part-time (2009-2013), under the supervision of Professor Blake Morrison and the late Professor Bart Moore-Gilbert.

At Brunel she has received the CBASS Lecturer of the Year Award (2022); Vice Chancellor's Award for Staff (2020); Teach Brunel Awards: Best Small Module Award (2017); CBASS Award for Excellence (2015). From 2014 to 2018 she was Public Orator for the University. Her other awards, honours and nominations can be found here.

Bernardine is also the Visiting Professor of Creative Media at Oxford University 2025/6. Prior to joining Brunel she taught creative writing on a freelance basis from the mid-1990s onwards. She held the Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College in 2015 and she was the Literature Mentor for the Rolex Mentor and Protege Initiative 2023 & 2024.

Her research focusses on the African diaspora and spans fiction, poetry, memoir, drama and non-fiction. Her ten books  (seven with Penguin Random House) include the memoir Manifesto: On Never Giving Up  (2021) and the essay, Look Again: Feminism (Tate Publishing, 2021). Her other books of fiction and verse fiction include her award-winning novel Mr Loverman (2013), which became a hit BBC One eight-part television series in 2024, winning two BAFTAs; Hello Mum (2010) - also adapted into the BBC R4 drama; Lara (1997, 2009); Blonde Roots (2008); Soul Tourists (2005) and The Emperor’s Babe (2001) - also adapted into a BBC R4 drama. 

She won the Booker Prize 2019 for her novel, Girl, Woman, Other (2019), which has sold over 1.5 million copies. It also won two British Book Awards, the Indie Book Award, and it received many other awards and honours. An international bestseller, it was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller for five weeks, staying in the Top 10 for 44 weeks. In 2025 she received the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award.

Her non-fiction includes essays, book introductions and for twenty years she reviewed books for the national media including for the Guardian, Times, TLS and Independent. She has edited anthologies, and guest-edited several publications and magazines including Poetry Review, Wasafiri, and the Sunday Times Style magazine in 2020.

Her books have been translated into nearly 40 languages and she has been invited to tour globally as a writer for thirty years. She chaired and curated the British Council Literature Seminar in Berlin in 2017, 2018 & 2023. She appears regularly in the UK at festivals and events as a writer and host. Her talks and lectures include for the British Academy (2023), the Bodleian Library Annual Lecture at Oxford University (2023) and the Gresham College Annual Lecture (2024).

Two documentaries have been made about her life, writing and career: The Southbank Show with Melvyn Bragg (2020) & Imagine with Alan Yentob (2021).

A panellist on many literary prizes, she has also initiated several literary projects including co-founding the London Writers Centre (formerly Spread the Word) in 1995. She founded The Complete Works poetry development scheme for poets of colour (2007-2017) at a time when under 1% of poetry books were by POC, and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (2012-2022) - set up to promote and develop African poetry; this prize is now run by the African Poetry Book Fund at Brown University, USA, and renamed the Evaristo African Poetry Prize. In 2021 she curated the 'Black Britain: Writing Back' series with Penguin Random House, republishing thirteen forgotten books from the past - the earliest title was published in 1909.

In 2024 she founded the RSL Scriptorium Awards - a writers' seaside residency on the Kent coast, and in 2025 the RSL Pioneer Prize, to acknowledge the contributions to literature and society of a woman writer over 60. The first recipient was Maureen Duffy, aged 92, in 2025.

She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) in 2004 and was elected President from 2022-2025. She was appointed President Emerita at the end of her term. She is an International Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; an Honorary Fellow of the English Association and an Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford. From 2020-2024 she was President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance.

In 2009 she was made an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for being ‘a major voice in the multicultural panorama of multicultural British literature’, and she received an OBE in 2020.  http://www.bevaristo.com