Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo, MBE FRSL FRSA, FEA, is an award-winning British writer, who has published poetry, short fiction, drama, non-fiction and literary criticism, as well as having her work produced for stage and radio. She is founder of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize.

Evaristo was born in London to an English mother, who was a schoolteacher, and a Nigerian father, who migrated to Britain in 1949 and became a welder. Her paternal grandfather was a Yoruba Saro who returned from Brazil to Nigeria and her paternal grandmother was from Abeokuta in Nigeria. Her mother's paternal great-grandfather arrived in London from Germany in the 1860s and settled in Woolwich, south-east London, and her mother's maternal grandmother arrived in London from Ireland in the 1880s and settled in Islington. The fourth of eight children, Evaristo was raised in Woolwich. She was educated at Greenwich Young People's Theatre, Eltham Hill Grammar School for Girls, the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she earned her Doctorate of Philosophy. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London. She lives in London with her husband.

Evaristo is the author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora. She notably experiments with form and narrative perspective, often merging the past with the present, fiction with poetry, the factual with the speculative, and reality with alternate realities (as in her 2008 novel Blonde Roots).

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