Evaristo's first book to be published was a 1994 collection of poems called Island of Abraham.[28] She went on to become the author of two non-fiction books, and eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora.[29] She experiments with form and narrative perspective,[29] often merging the past with the present, fiction with poetry, the factual with the speculative, and reality with alternate realities (as in her 2008 novel Blonde Roots).[30] Her verse novel The Emperor's Babe (Penguin, 2001) is about a black teenage girl, whose parents are from Nubia, coming of age in Roman London nearly 2,000 years ago.[31] It won an Arts Council Writers' Award 2000, a NESTA Fellowship Award in 2003, and went on to be chosen by The Times as one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade in 2010,[32] and it was adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2013.[33] Evaristo's fourth book, Soul Tourists (Penguin, 2005), is an experimental novel about a mismatched couple driving across Europe to the Middle East, which featured ghosts of real figures of colour from European history.[34][35]
Her novel Blonde Roots (Penguin, 2008) is a satire that inverts the history of the transatlantic slave trade and replaces it with a universe where Africans enslave Europeans.[36] Blonde Roots won the Orange Youth Panel Award[37] and Big Red Read Award,[20] and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.[38]
Evaristo's other books include the verse novel Lara (Bloodaxe Books, 2009, with an earlier version published in 1997), which fictionalised the multiple cultural strands of her family history going back over 150 years as well as her London childhood in a mixed-race family.[39] This won the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1998.[20] Her novella Hello Mum (Penguin, 2010) was chosen as "The Big Read" for the County of Suffolk and adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2012.[40]
Her 2014 novel Mr Loverman (Penguin UK, 2013/ Akashic Books USA, 2014) is about a septuagenarian Caribbean Londoner, a closet homosexual considering his options after a 50-year marriage to his wife.[41][42] It won the Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction (USA) and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.[43] In 2015, she wrote and presented a two-part BBC Radio 4 documentary, Fiery Inspiration – about Amiri Baraka, on BBC Radio 4.[44]
Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, Other (May 2019, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK) is an innovative polyvocal "fusion fiction"[45] about 12 primarily black British women. Their ages span 19 to 93 and they are a mix of cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, classes and geographies, and the novel charts their hopes, struggles and intersecting lives. In July 2019, the novel was selected for the Booker Prize longlist,[46] then made the shortlist, announced on 3 September 2019, alongside books by Margaret Atwood, Lucy Ellmann, Chigozie Obioma, Salman Rushdie and Elif Shafak.[47][48] On 14 October, Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize jointly with Atwood's The Testaments.[49][50] The win made Evaristo the first black woman and first Black British author to win the prize.[3][4][50][51][52] Girl, Woman, Other was one of Barack Obama's 19 Favourite Books of 2019 and Roxane Gay's Favourite Book of 2019.[53][54][55] The novel was also shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.[56]
In 2020, Evaristo won the British Book Awards: Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year,[57] the Indie Book Award for Fiction.[58] In June 2020, Evaristo became the first black woman and first Black British writer to reach number one in the UK paperback fiction charts,[59] where she held the top spot for five weeks and spent 44 weeks in the Top 10.[60]
Evaristo was included on the Powerlist 2021, the 14th edition of the annual Powerlist recognising the United Kingdom's most influential people of African or African Caribbean heritage.[61]
In 2022, Girl, Woman, Other was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors chosen to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.[62]
Evaristo's writing also includes short fiction, drama, poetry, essays, literary criticism, and projects for stage and radio. Two of her books, The Emperor's Babe (2001) and Hello Mum (2010), have been adapted into BBC Radio 4 dramas. Her ninth book, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up,[63] is published by Penguin UK (October 2021) and Grove Atlantic USA (2022). Her tenth book, Feminism (November 2021), is part of Tate Britain's "Look Again" series (Tate Publishing). She offers a personal survey of the representation of the art of British women of colour in the context of the gallery's forthcoming major rehang. In 2020 Evaristo collaborated with Valentino on their Collezione Milano collection, writing poetic text to accompany photographs of the collection by the photographer Liz Johnson Artur, published as a coffee-table book (Rizzoli, 2021).[64]
Evaristo has written many articles, essays, fiction and book reviews for publications including: The Times, Vanity Fair, The Guardian,[65] The Observer, The Independent, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar UK, The Times Literary Supplement, Conde Naste Traveller, Wasafiri, and the New Statesman.[66] She is a contributor to New Daughters of Africa: An international anthology of writing by women of African descent (2019), edited by Margaret Busby.[67][68]
