Poets & Writers Theater

“A lot of my life has been unconventional, but it has led to this point and I wouldn’t have reached this point if I’d given up.” In this Penguin Books UK video, Booker Prize–winning author Bernardine Evaristo speaks with her longtime editor Simon Prosser about her writing career and books, including her new memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Grove Press, 2022).

“Writing for me came about because I wanted to write from a Black British woman’s perspective.” In this Vogue Visionaries class produced in partnership with YouTube, Bernardine Evaristo offers a five-chapter tutorial on writing fiction and explains why “rejection is really good for you.”

In this Waterstones video, Bernadine Evaristo introduces her novel Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton, 2019), which she describes as “fusion fiction” and a “celebration of Black womanhood,” and the books that influenced her as a young writer. Evaristo won the 2019 Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other, sharing the prize with Margaret Atwood for The Testaments (Chatto & Windus, 2019).

“I’m still in awe of the range of stories and voices that they bring and the worlds that they open up. It’s an incredibly eclectic group.” In this video, Afua Hirsch and fellow members of the judging panel talk about the six books on the 2019 Booker Prize shortlist, which include The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, and Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann.