The first black woman to win the Booker recounts her lengthy journey from grotty London flats to an audience with the Queen in her eventful hymn to perseverance
Bernardine Evaristo always fancied winning the Booker prize. When Lara, her semi-autobiographical verse novel fictionalising her family history, was published in 1997, she wrote a note saying that she would one day receive the prestigious award. “A wild fantasy because I was as far away from winning it as a writer could be. Yet I’d seen how winning that prize could improve writers’ careers, bringing their work to mainstream attention,” she says in Manifesto, her memoir about perseverance. More than 20 years later, in 2019, Evaristo did win for Girl, Woman, Other, a multi-voiced novel about Black British womanhood, sharing the award with Margaret Atwood. This historic moment was polarising; some argued that it was a huge disappointment that rules were broken to split the prize the first time a Black woman won. But in Manifesto, she makes clear where she stands: “Two women, two races, two nations, two generations – two members of the human race.”
This kind of ad-speak for equality pops up often in this book. “We liked the same music and television programmes, breathed the same air, ate the same food, had the same feelings – human ones,” she writes, considering her desire to fit in with white friends. Ironically, she fails to apply these same sentiments to her Nigerian father. “I was embarrassed by his very dark skin and remember crossing the road when I saw him walking towards me. It was internalised racism, pure and simple.” External evils plagued her too. Bricks were thrown through the window at home, her extended family tried to warn her mother against “producing inferior mongrels” and, later, she was rejected from numerous creative opportunities. “Any person of colour applying to most drama schools came up against institutional racism.”