Interview
Bernardine Evaristo, Author of "Girl, Woman, Other"
- Bernadine Averisto's novel Girl, Woman, Other was written over a five-year period, starting in 2013, and was inspired by the scarcity of Black British women writing adult fiction.
- The author's initial ambition to write about "a thousand Black British women" was reduced to 12 primary characters after realizing a larger scope was unrealistic.
- The narrative spans approximately 120 years, featuring women aged 19 to 93, with origins ranging from the 19th century to the present day.
- Character demographics include diverse sexualities, classes, cultural backgrounds, and family structures, including four mother-daughter relationships, with one character identifying as non-binary.
- Averisto developed a style she calls "fusion fiction," characterized by a lack of full stops and long, flowing sentences designed to fuse the interconnected stories of the characters.
- While the author found the writing process liberating, she noted that the editing phase required four major drafts over five years and was challenging due to the lack of traditional punctuation for compartmentalization.
- The book's success is attributed to the convergence of the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements starting around 2016, which shifted the cultural zeitgeist toward valuing the multiplicity of Black British women's voices.
- Prior to the Booker Prize win, the publishing industry was characterized by tokenism, despite the existence of high-quality works by authors such as Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith.
- The 50-year history of the Booker Prize included only four shortlists for Black women; Averisto was the first Black woman to win the award.
- Averisto attributes her victory to the specific composition of the judging panel, which included four women, two of whom were women of color, contrasting with past panels dominated by older male figures.
- Following the win, the publishing industry began actively auditing its employment and publishing statistics to address historical exclusion of people of color.
- Sales data indicates a surge in engagement with non-fiction on race and gender, such as Reni Edo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, which moved from number 300 to number 1 shortly after George Floyd's death.
- Averisto argues that long-form fiction generates empathy and intellectual engagement by forcing readers to commit significant time to narratives outside their own lived experiences.
- She recommends Britt Bennett's The Vanishing Half as a standout recent work regarding the theme of racial passing, placing Bennett in the lineage of Toni Morrison.
- Emerging poets highlighted by the author include Teresa Lola, Rachel Long, Mona Arshi, Inua Ellams, and Derek Owusu.
- Averisto points to Live Little, founder of the Gal Dem magazine for women of color, and theatre directors Ola Ince and Lynette Linton as key figures driving current creative diversity.