Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo (born 28 May 1959) is an English author and Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University of London. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first black woman to win the Booker. The novel won many other awards including two British Book awards (aka "Nibbies"). In 2025, Evaristo was selected from among all previous Women's Prize for Fiction winners and nominees as the recipient of the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, a one-off literary honour to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University of London (BUL) and served for four years as President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.

Evaristo is a longstanding advocate for the inclusion of writers and artists. She co-founded Spread the Word writer development agency with Ruth Borthwick (1995–present) and Britain's first black women's theatre company (1982–1988), Theatre of Black Women. Evaristo organised Britain's first major black theatre conference, Future Histories, for the Black Theatre Forum (1995), at the Royal Festival Hall, and Britain's first major conference on black British writing, Tracing Paper (1997), at the Museum of London. Evaristo founded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, 2012–2022, which in 2023 became the Evaristo African Poetry Prize with the African Poetry Book Fund, and she initiated The Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour, 2007–2017. In 2024, she founded the RSL Scriptorium Awards, offering struggling UK writers "a place to write" on the Kent coast for up to a month each, in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature (RSL). In 2025, she founded the RSL Pioneer Prize, to be awarded to a different woman writer aged over 60 every year for ten years, the first winner being Maureen Duffy. The Pioneer Prize is funded by Evaristo's donation of the £100,000 she herself won from the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award.

Evaristo has received more than 90 honours, awards, fellowships, nominations and other markers of recognition, and her books have been a Book of the Year over 60 times. She is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2021, she succeeded Richard Eyre as President of Rose Bruford College, completing her four-year tenure in 2024 and succeeded by the actor Ray Fearon. Evaristo was vice-chair of the RSL governing council and in 2020 she became vice-president, before being announced as the RSL's president in 2021. At the end of Evaristo's four-year term, Elif Shafak was named in December 2025 as the RSL's new president.

Evaristo was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen's 2009 Birthday Honours, and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's 2020 Birthday Honours, both awards for services to literature.