Bernardine Evaristo sets a rousing example of ‘never giving up’

Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto — part instructional guide for artists, part call to arms for equality, part literary memoir —shimmers with unfailing self-belief and a strong vein of humility. When Evaristo won the Booker Prize in 2019 for her magnificent seventh novel Girl, Woman, Other, the first black woman to do so, it was the pinnacle of a career devoted not just to honing her craft but to helping others traditionally excluded from the literary world, through teaching, mentoring and activism.

There is a great deal of style to Evaristo’s life story; her childhood has strong storybook notes. Her home was a huge, rundown house in south London with 12 rooms, eight children and a bannister valiant enough to bear them. In their front room stood two broken antique pianos. The young Bernardine dreamed of formica and linoleum. Her white, Catholic, teacher mother was a terrific home-maker, insisting on healthy eating and tons of cuddles. Her children competed well into their teenage years to massage her tired legs at night. Her black, Nigerian, welder father, Julius, a strict disciplinarian, had an approach to home improvements which wasn’t suited to the human lifespan — a bath languishing uninstalled against the bathroom wall for several decades. (Beat that.)

It was a political household, and proud to be so, her father working as a Labour councillor and shop steward, her mother the union rep at the school where she taught. Yet Julius’s extreme strictness, his frequent recourse to the wooden spoon and the belt and the hour-long lectures that preceded these punishments meant his children often lived in fear. Additionally, Evaristo’s mother’s family’s vehement opposition to her marriage to a Nigerian wounded the children’s sense of identity. ‘We grew up knowing that some of the people who should have been closest to us disapproved of us to the extent they had nothing to do with us.’