Bernardine Evaristo receives Women's Prize outstanding contribution award
The trust is known for the Women's Prize for Fiction, a popular literary award that was established in 1996.
Evaristo, 66, who was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 for her novel Girl, Woman, Other, will be presented with the award and £100,000 prize money on June 12 at the Women's Prize Trust's summer party in London.
She said: 'I am completely overwhelmed and overjoyed to receive this unique award.
'I feel such deep gratitude towards the Women's Prize for honouring me in this way.
'Over the last three decades I have witnessed with great admiration and respect how the Women's Prize for Fiction has so bravely and brilliantly championed and developed women's writing, always from an inclusive stance.
'The financial reward comes as an unexpected blessing in my life and, given the mission of the Women's Prize Trust, it seems fitting that I spend this substantial sum supporting other women writers; more details on this will be forthcoming.'
Evaristo will be honoured alongside the winners of the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction and the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, which was won by V V Ganeshananthan and Naomi Klein respectively, last year.
Authors who have been longlisted or won the Women's Prize for Fiction over the past three decades, and had published a minimum of five books, were eligible for the outstanding contribution award.
The winner of the outstanding contribution award was selected by a judging panel chaired by novelist and non-fiction author Kate Mosse, founder director of the Women's Prize for Fiction and Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.
She said: 'My fellow judges and I always knew it would be a tall order to choose just one author from the many exceptional contemporary writers who have made such a huge contribution in a world where women's voices are increasingly being silenced, where the arts and artists are under attack.
'Books encourage empathy, they offer alternative and diverse points of view; they help us to stand in other people's shoes and to see our own worlds in the mirror.
'In the end, we felt that Bernardine Evaristo's beautiful, ambitious and inventive body of work (which includes plays, poetry, essays, monologues and memoir as well as award-winning fiction), her dazzling skill and imagination, and her courage to take risks and offer readers a pathway into diverse and multifarious worlds over a forty-year career, made her the ideal recipient of the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award.'
The Women's Prize Trust says the one-off award marks the 30th anniversary year of the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Evaristo, who was born in Woolwich, south London, and is of Anglo-Nigerian descent, has shed light on the lives of modern British women through her work, taking an interest in the African diaspora.
She has launched several successful writing schemes to support women writers and under-represented writers of colour, including the Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets.
Several of her works, including The Emperor's Babe and Hello Mum, have been adapted into BBC Radio 4 plays.
Evaristo's other novels include Blonde Roots, Soul Tourists and Mr Loverman. The latter was turned into an eight-part BBC drama starring Lennie James and Ariyon Bakare.
The actors, who star as lovers struggling to go public with their relationship, picked up Baftas for their roles during the academy's TV awards in May.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
17 hours ago
- Spectator
Let straight white men write novels!
About 15 years ago, I tried to interest my literary agent in a state-of-the-nation novel set in 21st-century London. My model was Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe's masterpiece about New York in the 1980s. I'd read Wolfe's essay in Harper's magazine called 'Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast' in which he urges ambitious young authors to dispense with namby-pamby, post-modernist experimental nonsense and follow in the footsteps of Balzac, Zola and Dickens – write realistic novels documenting every aspect of contemporary society in granular detail. I wrote a 10,000-word proposal summarising the story, which began with a black teenage drug dealer coming to the rescue of a posh teenage girl in Shepherd's Bush by fighting off a group of roadmen trying to steal her puppy. They gradually get enmeshed in each other's lives, with predictable tragi-comic results. It was basically Romeo and Juliet but with race and class dividing the lovers. I was quite pleased with it and so was my agent. That is, until she ran it past a recent Cambridge graduate she'd just hired as an in-house sensitivity reader, who declared it an absolute 'no-no'. How dare I, as a straight white man, presume to create a young female character and – worse – a young black man? Talk about cultural appropriation! If the agency sent this proposal out to publishers and they commissioned it, it would be denying a voice to the very people I was proposing to speak on behalf of. Didn't I realise the literary phallocracy was in its death throes? The 'litbros' must make way for girlboss authors such as Zadie Smith and Rachel Cusk. I talked it over with my agent and she said this probably reflected the prevailing attitude in the publishing trade, which is largely made up of young female graduates. And so it proved to be. These days, novels written by straight white men – particularly young men – are as rare as hen's teeth. No white British man under 40 has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize since 2011. The closest is Douglas Stuart, a 49-year-old Scot, who won it in 2020. This isn't just true of the UK obviously. A recent article in Compact revealed that not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in the New Yorker. The dearth of young male novelists has reached such a pass that various literary lions are taking steps to address the problem. Unfortunately, their pleas for young men to submit manuscripts are nearly always prefaced by the usual throat-clearing about the insufferable privilege enjoyed by straight white males. For instance, a novelist and critic called Jude Cook announced in April that he was launching an independent literary press called Conduit Books that would focus on overlooked male writers. 'We believe there is ambitious, funny, political and cerebral fiction by men that is being passed by,' he said. He then spoilt it by denouncing the male-dominated literary scene of the 1980s and 1990s as 'toxic' and described the 'excitement and energy around new and adventurous fiction' by female authors like Sally Rooney as a 'timely corrective'. Not sure I'll be sending my proposal to him. Another bat signal appeared in the New York Times at the end of last year, entitled 'The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone'. The author, who teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, urged men to start writing novels again, not because he thought they might have something to say but because it might get other men reading again and that would be therapeutic. 'Reading fiction is an excellent way to improve one's emotional IQ,' he said. That, in turn, would be good for women. Literature helped men 'transgress patriarchal boundaries', he added, and that meant the lives of women 'fundamentally changed for the better'. When will these self-appointed champions of male novelists stop apologising for being men? The literary agent Matthew Hamilton told me an anecdote that illustrated the point: 'Last week I heard a story of a prominent agent submitting a novel by a straight white male and apologising it was by a straight white male in the accompanying letter. Needless to say, he's a straight white male.' Happily, there's light at the end of the tunnel. Hachette has folded its Dialogue division, which was set up to publish more 'diverse' authors, into another subsidiary, and a literary agency set up to find 'new voices' (i.e. anyone apart from straight white men) has just closed its doors. Perhaps I should set up an imprint myself: Toxic Books. It would just publish novels by people like me for people like me. I might make a mint.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Telegraph
Look out, Sherlock, Mark Gatiss has created a brilliant new sleuth
In Bookish (U&Drama), a detective drama by Mark Gatiss set in 1946, Gabriel Book is a super-sleuth without a super power. Book doesn't bang on about little grey cells or make Sherlock-style synaptic leaps. He is just a bookshop owner who has read a lot of books, and from there gleaned knowledge about what makes people tick. No violin-playing, no bravura deduction, no visions. It's actually quite refreshing. Mark Gatiss, Bookish's writer and star, has also quite evidently read a lot of books, as well as seen a lot of classic movies. With his work on Sherlock and Dracula, as well as his annual ghost stories for BBC Two, Gatiss is steeped in crime fiction. He knows the genre inside out, and Bookish therefore toes a teasing line between things you've seen or read before and new ways of repackaging those old things for television in 2025. Although the story is set in 1946, that strange era immediately postwar where a broken Britain was rebuilt in a hurry, away from the whodunits its themes are contemporary. Book is gay but has to hide behind a lavender marriage to avoid social stigma. Much of the show away from the mystery of the week unpicks how Book and Trottie (Polly Walker) aka Mrs Book, first met, and how and why they came to their convenient arrangement. Similarly, at the beginning of the series a young man called Jack (Connor Finch) is released from Whitechapel prison and thereafter welcomed into Book and Trottie's embrace with suspicious alacrity. There is, obviously, some connection between Jack, Book and Trottie. What it is forms another gentle puzzle that bubbles along beneath all six episodes of what will surely be the first of many series. (In fact as I write a second has just been announced). Bookish is first and foremost a clever, witty, well-plotted sleuther. From an opening two-parter about a poisoned butcher (Danny Mays, having a blast) to a finale about murder at the esteemed Walsingham Hotel, Bookish is a series of puzzles that are presented and then solved with a satisfying completeness. Gatiss plays fair by his viewer, asking them the same questions based on the same evidence that he asks of his detective. This, of course, is the Agatha Christie formula, but it is much easier to get wrong than right. What it isn't is gritty or cutting-edge, and at times it veers towards arch. But then in a series called Bookish about a man called Book who owns a bookshop called Book's Books (and loves to tell everyone why the apostrophe is quite correct in this instance) there should be no expectation of gore or grime such as in Netflix's recent Dept Q or HBO's True Detective. This is an overwhelmingly fun-filled drama that happens to be about multiple murders. It helps that it looks superb, given what must have been a low budget, and its cast – featuring names as grand as Elliot Levey, Joely Richardson and Paul McGann – adds extra lustre. Bookish is not game-changing, but it is not trying to change the game, just let us enjoy playing it. In the last 12 months we have had Ludwig, Death Valley and now this, all plotting a course for what British drama can offer having been priced out of the market for grandeur by US streamers. Another puzzle solved. Bookish airs on U&Alibi on Wednesday 16 July from 8pm
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Telegraph
Dear Richard Madeley: My husband's still friendly with a woman he had an affair with 15 years ago
Dear Richard, My husband of 40 years had two affairs which I only learnt of 15 years ago. He came with me to counselling when the first affair came to light, but didn't reveal the existence of the second until later. Still, we decided to make the best of it and we stayed together, and I don't think he's strayed since. My problem is that he is still in touch with the second woman, the one he didn't want to talk about at counselling. He sends her birthday cards and they write newsy emails (I recently saw one of these on his computer). He insists nothing untoward is going on but I am convinced he has feelings for her – he's been very defensive on the few occasions when I've brought the subject up. The thing is that she lives pretty close by, and it would be easy for him to slip by and see her. I don't want to be his jailer and I don't want to deny him a friendship but this has made me feel that we rebuilt our relationship on very shaky foundations 15 years ago, and I am having hard time believing anything he says at the moment. Given that we're all in our 70s I'm not sure it matters – but if it turned out that this woman is 'the one that got away' and he's always carried a torch for her, I'd feel decidedly miffed. In the meantime it's eroding our (mostly pretty friendly and supportive) day-to-day relationship. I have asked him outright whether he's seeing her romantically and he's said no – but he's lied about her to me before. What should I believe? – S, via email Dear S, Yourself. Your 'still, small voice'. Your instinct. Faced by a husband with a record for betrayal, lying and obfuscating, I really don't see what else you can do. You've been thrown back, perforce, on your own resources. So, trust your judgment. I've reread your letter and your tone is remarkably calm, controlled and considered. You are very much the grown-up in the room, S. By contrast, your husband is behaving like an entitled child. So you must assert yourself. It is COMPLETELY unacceptable for him to maintain a cosy relationship with one of his former mistresses. They're not simply old friends or former colleagues. They were lovers. She was his big secret. You tell me she lives nearby and wonder if he is still secretly visiting her. I'm sorry to tell you I think it's very likely that he is. He sounds to me like the sort of man who grants himself permission to do more or less whatever takes his whim. Of course, if you issue him with an ultimatum – cease all contact with this former (and very possibly current) paramour – there's every prospect he'll simply continue doing so in secret. In which case – and I don't mean to sound melodramatic – you may wish to make brief employment of a private detective. Your mind will be put at rest, or your suspicions confirmed. Knowledge is power, S. And you need to know exactly what's going on so you can make decisions that work for you. Good luck.
