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1. Bernardine is from a very big family

Born in 1959, Evaristo grew up in South-East London. “My father was from Nigeria,” she says. “He came over in 1949. And my mother was a white English woman, who grew up not far from Woolwich, where I grew up.” She is one of eight children. As the fourth child, she says she rarely got to choose what to watch on the telly (her brothers wanted to watch football) and would frequently go to the library for books. “From the age of five… every week I was getting out as many [books] as I could… There wasn’t a lot to do, even though we were a large family. My dad was incredibly strict. Also, I think he was scared for us. He didn’t want us out on the streets, as a black family in a white area.”

2. They used to be the focus of racist vandalism

“Racism, as a term, I don’t remember encountering it… when I was very young,” says Evaristo, but she was aware that some people didn’t like her family “because we were brown people”. She says that people “used to smash our windows on a regular basis.” While she was aware of the prejudice, Evaristo says it was when she was a teenager that she really “started to engage with the idea of racism”, which she would go on to explore through much of her work.

3. The Catholic church influenced her writing

When asked about her earliest influences, Evaristo looks to her Catholic upbringing. Her first school was run by nuns. “Church was incredibly boring for the most part,” she says. “But I did like the ritual of it… [Churches] felt very grand… And the language is very rich. It was much, much later – actually, not so long ago – that I realised that shaped my writing. I started to write when I was probably 19. I had spent 10 years being absolutely steeped in the language of the church… It was all very poetic and very heightened.”

4. She used to be an actress

Evaristo started going to youth theatre when she was 12 and then went on to drama school. “In the youth theatre I went to [Tramsheds], everybody was welcome,” she says. “I think it probably attracted people different from the mainstream. In that space you could be who you were. I was the only black child there for a lot of my time there, and I didn’t feel it. I was accepted.” After college, she set up her own theatre company, The Theatre Of Black Women, with two friends. “The mission was to create our own theatre, about our lives, because nobody else was doing that… There was very little work for us. So we had two choices: try to find work, which is notoriously difficult for any actors, let alone black women, or set up our own theatre.”

5. Theatre taught her the power of making your own change

“The main thing I learned [from theatre] was the value of doing it yourself,” says Evaristo. “That it was possible to make a difference by getting off your arse and creating the… artistic projects that aren’t there for you. And that, as a writer, is also what I do.” Evaristo has written continuously since her late teens (she wrote her first play in 1982, when she was 23), even though fame came later. Her first novel, Lara, wasn’t published until 1997. “I wrote for many years,” she says. “Nobody was waiting for me to publish books. Nobody was commissioning me. I just wrote on spec and hoped that somebody would publish me.”

6. She changed her accent as a teenager

Evaristo grew up in South London, but her accent has little trace of it. She puts this down to her mother, plus a teenage decision to lose any accent. “[My mother] was from North London, Islington, working class family,” she says. “Her mother was Irish but was genteel. Her side of the family were very aspirational. They didn’t really sound working class. My mother transferred to us a certain way of speaking.” At the age of 14, Evaristo noticed that the way she spoke was different to many of the people around her. She was working at her youth theatre, as an usher. “One of my peers… was asking people… ’Would you like a programme?’ And I was asking, ‘Do you want a programme?’ A subtle difference, but I heard it.” She began to iron out parts of her speech until she used “Standard English”. She says, “I think that was a good thing for me to do. I hate to say it.”

7. A bad relationship changed her life

Evaristo has had relationships with both men and women. She says, “I had relationships with men up to the age of about 20. And then I spent a period of 10 years where I had relationships with women. And then I went back to being heterosexual again.” One of her most formative relationships was when she was 25, with a woman who had a very controlling influence over her. “Today we would call it a coercively controlling relationship,” she says, “but that term, I don’t even know if it existed in the ‘80s… I was slowly crushed by this person, to the extent that I think I lost the capacity to be independent, to think for myself.” She eventually left the relationship and realised she was worth more. “Because of that, I became powerful and unstoppable… I think when you leave that kind of relationship it’s a lesson in not repeating the same mistakes.”

8. Her dad never read her books

Evaristo says that her parents were always supportive of her decision to go into the arts. “They didn’t mind,” she says. “I never had the pep talk, telling me that I needed to go and get a certain kind of job. I was free.” Her parents were proud when she started having books published, but only one parent actually read them. “My mother has read all my books,” she says. “My father didn’t really read books. He pretended, but he hadn’t read them. But he was very proud of me and would brandish them around.”

9. She predicted her Booker win

Evaristo says she has always believed in the power of affirmations, stating a wish as truth and therefore causing it to eventually come true. When she published the novel Lara, back in 1997, Evaristo wrote a note to herself, saying she would win the Booker Prize. She won in 2019, for Girl, Woman, Other. “I’ve been writing affirmations for a very long time, about 25 years,” she says, but she won’t reveal what else is in them. “I have never shared them. I have a truckload. I’ve never shared them with anybody, because if I had told people all those years ago, not that I wanted to win the Booker Prize… but that in my mind I had – which is how you do affirmations, in the present tense – they would have carted me away.”