WEBVTT NOTE Episode 121: Fusion Fiction: Bernardine Evaristo on Twelve Voices and No Full Stops 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:17.000 Welcome to Behind the Book. I'm Nora Ellis. My guest today is Bernardine Evaristo: Booker Prize winner, professor, and the author of Mr Loverman, the memoir Manifesto, and the novel we are here to talk about, Girl, Woman, Other. Bernardine, welcome. 2 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:23.000 Thank you, lovely to be here. Ask me anything except where I get my ideas. 3 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:28.000 Then let's start with the book itself. What is it? 4 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:49.000 Twelve people, mostly Black British women, mostly connected in ways they do not know about, across about a century. Written in what I call fusion fiction: the rhythm of poetry with the reach of a novel, and almost no full stops. It opens on the morning of a play at the National Theatre and spirals outwards from there. 5 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:52.000 Why twelve? 6 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:10.000 Because one Black British woman cannot represent all of us, and readers will always try to make her do it. Put twelve in a book and nobody can be reduced to a type. One is a lesbian playwright, one is a banker, one is a farmer in her nineties. They disagree with each other, which is the point. 7 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:16.000 You published for four decades before the prize. What kept you going? 8 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:36.000 Sheer bloody mindedness and a community. I came out of theatre, so I never expected to be discovered, I expected to build. I ran a company, I toured, I taught. By the time the Booker arrived I was sixty with eight books behind me and no illusions, which is a very safe way to receive good news. 9 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:40.000 What did you want this book to do? 10 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:55.000 Put people into literature who were left out of it, and enjoy myself doing it. I am not interested in worthy books. I want them alive, funny and argumentative, the way a room full of women actually sounds. 11 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:58.000 And how big do you want it to get? 12 00:01:58.000 --> 00:02:17.000 Enormous, please. I want it on syllabuses, in book clubs, in the hands of a girl in Peckham who has never seen herself on a shelf. I will happily do the festivals and the videos and the posts. Being read is not vulgar. Being unread is what stops writers writing. 13 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:21.000 Advice for a writer who feels they have started too late? 14 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:27.000 There is no timetable. The only thing that disqualifies you is stopping. 15 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:49.000 Bernardine Evaristo, thank you. Every guest on this show leaves with a promotion campaign from us, so Girl, Woman, Other is on our promoted books page this month and going to our whole mailing list. Subscribe, rate the show, and send this to the writer in your life who thinks the door has closed. I'm Nora Ellis. This was Behind the Book.