Bernardine Evaristo was in an ebullient mood when she joined me and an audience at a branch of Foyles bookshop in London, three days after she became the first black woman to win the Booker Prize – jointly with Margaret Atwood, in a rule-breaking decision by the judges. Evaristo, 60, has long been celebrated for her groundbreaking subject matter and whip-smart prose, but her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other, is her most expansive yet. Telling the stories of a dozen British women, most of whom are black, it spans more than 100 years and deals with identity, ancestry, prejudice, motherhood, sex, politics and art. Initially, Evaristo told us, the project didn’t feel timely. “But then #MeToo happened, and Black Lives Matter, and that shifted the cultural consciousness. By the time I finished, I thought, ‘I think this is going to be really of the moment.’” She couldn’t have guessed quite how right she would be.
New Statesman: What was the genesis of the novel?
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