Bernardine evaristo biography of barack obama
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When the British author Bernardine Evaristo was in her early twenties, she and her drama-school friends would go to London’s theatres and heckle the performances. “It wouldn’t have been anything like ‘Rubbish!’ because it was a political heckling,” Evaristo, now sixty-two, told me recently. They would have been more likely to yell “Sexist!” or “Racist!” and then disappear, giddily, into the night. Recounting the habit this past December, Evaristo put on a mock posh accent and called it “appalling, appalling behavior.” The week prior, she had been named president of the U.K.’s Royal Society of Literature, becoming the first person of color to hold the position in the organization’s two-hundred-year history. (She is also the first who did not attend at least one of the following: Oxford, Cambridge, Eton.) Evaristo has some sympathy for her younger, angrier self. If social media had been around in her youth, she thinks she might have been one of what she calls the “Rabid Wolves of the Twittersphere.” “But we do need these renegades out there, don’t we?” she said. “We do need these people who will just lob a verbal hand grenade.”
Since 2011, Evaristo and her husband, David Shannon, have lived on the outskirts of West London, where she has dubbed herself “Mz Evaristo of Suburbia
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“In a different memoir, [Evaristo] describes h
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Author Bernardine Evaristo had just fallen asleep in her London home on the night before New Year’s Eve 2019 when her phone began pinging repeatedly. Feeling irritated to have been awoken, she peered into the screen wondering why people were disturbing her at this late hour. The messages she read felt surreal.
Former U.S. president Barack Obama had listed her ninth book Girl, Woman, Other on his social media platforms as one of his favourite novels of 2019. The Obama accolades shared space with other unbelievable news, too — American author Roxane Gay, whom Evaristo admired greatly, named the book the best of the year.
It was an incredible capper to what had been a dream year for Evaristo, who had won England’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, only months earlier, making her not only the first Black woman, but also the first Black British person ever to receive the honour.
Booker Prize win set off jump in interest
“Winning the Booker Prize was career affirming and life changing,” said Evaristo in a recent email interview with the University of Calgary, conducted in advance of her Feb. 3 virtual appearance. She will be speaking as the university’s 2021-22 Distinguished Visiting Writer (DVW), an annual event put on by the Calgary Distinguished Writ