Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo was born and raised in London, where she still lives. She has published four cross-genre novels: Lara (new edition, Bloodaxe Books, 2009); Blonde Roots (Penguin, 2008), a prose novel in which Africans enslave Europeans; a novel-with-verse, Soul Tourists (Penguin 2005), which featured ghosts of luminaries including Pushkin, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Alessandro dei Medici; and The Emperor’s Babe (Penguin, 2001), a verse novel about a black girl growing up in Roman London nearly 2000 years ago.

She co-edited the Granta new writing anthology NW15 in 2007 with novelist Maggie Gee; has written short fiction and drama for BBC radio and literary criticism for the Guardian, Times and Independent; and is an Associate Editor of the international literature magazine Wasafiri. She has taken part in over 60 international tours as a writer. She co-edited the Spread the Word new poets anthology Ten (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) with Daljit Nagra.

Watch the Making of Ten, a ten-minute documentary featuring all ten poets and an interview with Bernardine Evaristo herself: