Interview
Bernardine Evaristo, Author of "Girl, Woman, Other"
- Industry diversification is expected to continue as publishers review past employment and publishing records to address exclusion, leading to a search for diverse narratives including working-class, queer, and disability stories, which the speaker believes will make society more sophisticated and improve readers' empathy.
- The publishing sector is predicted to see a shift from tokenism to genuine support, driven by a zeitgeist change that gained momentum around 2016 with the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, a trend further accelerated by George Floyd's death which caused books on race to surge from niche to top bestsellers.
- Long-form fiction is described as requiring a commitment of one day to several weeks, serving as a tool for intellectual engagement and understanding stories outside one's own experience, though the speaker notes this format risks being missed by readers who exclusively consume content featuring white men.
- Specific upcoming trends include the rising influence of women of color in mainstream media and the arts, with young women becoming a powerful generation by 2016 and emerging figures such as poets Teresa Lola, Rachel Long, Mona Arshi, Inua Ellams, and Derek Owusu gaining traction.
- The speaker identifies significant risks regarding the industry's structure, specifically the belief that writers must break through in their 20s to succeed, and warns that the Booker Prize judging history has been dominated by white men, though a recent panel composition featuring four women (two of color) including Margaret Atwood was crucial to her selection.
- Regarding specific works, the speaker's novel The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett is cited as a major example of a radical experimental novel covering 120 years of history with characters aged 19 to 93, featuring non-binary identification and four mother-daughter relationships, while the speaker's own work took five years to write, starting in 2013.
- The speaker anticipates that the Booker Prize win will have a lasting impact in the years to come, acting as a turning point that elevated her book from a radical experimental work to a centerpiece of the establishment, despite the initial lack of immediate success.
- New voices in the arts are highlighted as a positive development, including 29-year-old director Ola Ince in the West End, Lynette Linton's leadership at the Bush Theatre for the past couple of years, and the magazine gal-dem which was founded four to five years ago to support women of color.
- The speaker notes that their own writing process involved removing commas and avoiding traditional sentences to allow the text to "fly out," a technique they claim would be impossible for non-experimental writers to replicate, while acknowledging their own background as an author since the early 80s and a professor at Brunel University London.
- Historical context is provided regarding the Booker Prize's 50 to 52-year lifespan, noting that only four Black women have been shortlisted in that time, contrasting with the speaker's observation that previous years featured judging panels of "Tory, grandy men of a certain age."