Bernardine Evaristo

Evaristo grew up in Woolwich, the fourth of eight children of a Nigerian father and white English mother, and co-founded Britain's first Black women's theatre company in 1982. Performance poetry led to the verse novels Lara and The Emperor's Babe (a Sudanese girl in Roman London) and the gleeful inverted-slavery satire Blonde Roots.

Girl, Woman, Other (2019), twelve interlinked lives running from a Newcastle bank supervisor to a National Theatre playwright, shared the Booker with Margaret Atwood, making Evaristo the first Black woman and first Black British writer to win it.

Since then: the memoir-manifesto Manifesto, a professorship at Brunel, and the presidency of the Royal Society of Literature, its first ever held by a writer of colour.