Evaristo wins accolades for breaking literary boundaries

Bernardine Evaristo doesn't like boundaries. For the Booker Prize-winning novelist, rules about genre, grammar or what a working-class biracial woman can achieve are all to be challenged and swept away. Evaristo was announced on Wednesday as recipient of the 100,000-pound ($135,000) Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award for her “transformative impact on literature and her unwavering dedication to uplifting under-represented voices.”

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Evaristo, 66, received the prize both for her work to help promote women and writers of colour, and for writing that takes in poetry, a memoir and seven novels including the Booker-winning “Girl, Woman, Other.”

“I just go wherever my imagination takes me,” she said. “I didn’t want to write the kind of novels that would take you on a predictable emotional or moral journey.” Evaristo had already explored autobiographical fiction, historical settings and alternate realities when she won the Booker in 2019 for “Girl Woman, Other,” a polyphonic novel told from the point of view of a dozen characters, largely Black women, with widely varying ages, experiences and sexualities. She was the first woman of African heritage to be awarded the prize, which was founded in 1969 and has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. When she won, Evaristo was 60 and had been a writer for decades. She says the recognition “came at the right time for me.”