“I wanted people to know what it took to get to this point as a writer and I thought it was an interesting journey I’d had. “I just wanted to describe how my own life had been shaped by my creativity in my own words, because I had given so many interviews and talked a lot about myself – a lot! – and it made sense to put it down on paper,” she says. Oh yeah, Bernardine Evaristo! She won it years ago!”

“Soon enough I’ll be in the distant past. There have been three more Booker winners since she shared the prize with Margaret Atwood. “I feel the need to utilise this moment because it will pass, you know,” she says. Margaret Atwood (left) and Bernardine Evaristo celebrate their joint Booker Prize win. As we sit down in her lounge, she sets her phone alarm for 30 minutes hence. In 2021, between Zooms, she wrote an account of her creative life, beginning as one of eight children in a mixed race London family, called Manifesto on Never Giving Up. “We’ve republished 11 there are another two coming out this year.” Her ongoing projects include curating a list of republished works by Black British authors for Penguin. What the Booker win meant was that more people – a great many more people – were taking notice of both her writing and literary activism.

“But also I’ve always been a very busy writer, someone very involved with the literary and arts world.”

“I taught for two years online festivals talking in a blank space on my computer, which wasn’t great,” she says.

Her work schedule didn’t waver, however, because her dance card was already full. Hard on the heels of the presentation and celebratory dinner come the interviews, the literature festivals, the invitations to judge this or curate that.įor Bernardine Evaristo, author of 2019 winner Girl, Woman, Other, the Booker effect was mitigated to some extent by COVID, which meant many festivals – including those in Sydney and Melbourne, where she was supposed to tour in 2020 – were cancelled or cut back to podcasts. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text sizeĪnyone who wins the Booker, the prime literary prize for English-language fiction, is hopelessly, helplessly busy.

Bound By Her Ring by Nicole Flockton