In her introduction to Manifesto, Bernardine Evaristo recalls her experience of becoming an “overnight success” after four decades of working in the arts. The author won the Booker prize in 2019 for her novel Girl, Woman, Other (she shared the award with Margaret Atwood). The book quickly topped bestseller lists and, as the first Black woman to win the Booker, Evaristo became headline news. At the time, she told interviewers she felt “unstoppable”, though it also led her to thinking about her path to success.
Her aim, then, in Manifesto, is to reflect on what shaped her achievements and what it took “to keep going and growing”. The result is part memoir, part manual dispensing tips on turning a creative passion into a profession, complete with advice on self-discipline and maintaining a “PMA” (Positive Mental Attitude).
Evaristo, who narrates herself, is excellent company. Her delivery is spry and no-nonsense as she relays snapshots from her childhood – she is the fourth of eight siblings born to a white British mother and Nigerian father – and the obstacles she faces as a mixed-race woman who has always felt like an outsider.
She tells of her creative life, which began in theatre, and recalls the writers, from Audre Lorde to Toni Morrison to Ntozake Shange, who “foregrounded Black women’s lives and in doing so gave me permission to write”.
For Evaristo, the process of learning, and of refining her writing skills, continues. It’s with characteristic wisdom that she notes: “There is no point of arrival whereby one stops growing as a creative person. To think otherwise will lead to creative repetition and stagnation.”
• Available from Penguin Audio, 6hr 8min
Further listening
Small Pleasures
Clare Chambers, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 9hr 58min
Karen Cass narrates the Learning to Swim author’s novel, which is set in the 1950s and features a disillusioned journalist called upon to report on claims by a local woman of an immaculate conception.
All the Young Men
Ruth Coker Burks, Trapeze, 13hr 3min
Burks’s poignant memoir recalls her time in 1980s Arkansas, caring for men with HIV and Aids after medical professionals, and often the patients’ own families, insisted on keeping them at arm’s length. Read by the author.
