The first international symposium dedicated to Bernardine Evaristo’s work will take place on November 6. it is organized by Dr. Nicola Abram at the University of Reading as part of the Routledge ‘Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays’ series. The event honors Evaristo as one of the most important living writers today.

Evaristo became the first Black woman and Black British person to win the Booker Prize when Girl, Woman, Other took the award in 2019. Yet her literary career spans decades and ten books across fiction, verse fiction, poetry, essay, radio, and theatre. Her formally innovative works center on the African diaspora: Lara (1997) is a semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse tracing family across generations and continents; The Emperor’s Babe (2001) follows a Black teenager in Roman Londinium; Blonde Roots (2008) reimagines transatlantic history with Africans enslaving Europeans; Mr Loverman (2013) explores sexuality in Britain’s older Caribbean community. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Beyond her writing, Evaristo is a longstanding advocate for writers and artists of color. She is President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first Black person to hold the role since 1820, and Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University of London. In 2025, she received the Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, a one-off prize marking the 30th anniversary of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The symposium supported by the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing and the Diversity and Inclusion Initiative Fund at the University of Reading, brings scholars together to explore Evaristo’s diverse writings and develop new critical approaches to her work. The event features a keynote by Professor Suzanne Scafe (University of Brighton) and concludes with an interview and Q&A with Evaristo, open to the public.

This gathering marks an important moment of scholarly recognition for a writer whose formal innovation and political engagement have long deserved sustained critical attention.