Who is ... Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo is a British writer who originally trained as an actress and worked in theatre. She is the author of Lara (1997), which traces the roots of her mixed-race English, Nigerian, Brazilian, and Irish family over 150 years, three continents and seven generations; The Emperor's Babe (2001), a story about Zuleika, a Sudanese girl who grows up in Roman London 1800 years ago and has an affair with the Roman Emperor; and Soul Tourists (2005), which is about a car journey across Europe starring a mismatched couple. Her latest novel is Blonde Roots (2008), which flips the script and supposes that Europeans were enslaved by Africans (Read the halftribe.com review here.) She is working on her forthcoming work, Hello Mum, which you will hear more about in the interview.

Listen to a sample of the interview here (4 mins):

Bernardine has also written for theatre, radio, print media and for a multi-media collaboration for the City of London Festival in 2003. She has undertaken over 50 international writers' tours since 1997 and has been a Visiting Professor at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York, Writer-in-Residence at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, and Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She represented Britain on Literaturexpress Europa 2000, which took 105 European writers through 11 European countries over six weeks by train, travelling from Portugal to Berlin via Belgium, the Baltics and Russia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts and this year, Ms. Evaristo was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honors’ List, 2009.

You can read more about Bernardine on her blog.

Listen to the full interview here (40 mins):

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