Proud Booker winner opens up about prize controversy and race
THE AUTHOR controversially awarded a joint Booker prize last year has said she understands why fans are angry she did not win outright.
Bernardine Evaristo became the first black Briton to earn the coveted prize last year for her novel Girl, Woman, Other, alongside Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments.
But critics felt she should have been the sole winner, frustrated she had to share the £50,000 prize money.
The 61-year-old said she understood their concerns, telling Desert Island Discs: “I don’t think I could have been any more happy if I’d won it on my own, to be honest.
“I’ll take the Booker Prize any way it comes and [Margaret Atwood] is such a phenomenal woman.”
But she added: “I get what other people see, people from outside, who think, ‘You’re the first black woman, you should have got it on your own’. And if I wasn’t the person who got it, I might think that.” Evaristo went on to describe the moment she won: “We walked on to the stage hand in hand and Margaret gave me the podium. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s so generous and so sweet’.”
She also described feeling insecure in her identity as a young person: “I probably saw Africa in the way
Africa was seen back then, somewhere uncivilised and savage and not somewhere to be proud of. “My father was a very dark-skinned black man, and I remember when
I was 11 seeing him walking down the street towards me and I crossed the road because I didn’t wa want to say hello.
““That feels terrible now, bu but that’s what it was like gr growing up in the 60s and 70 70s in a very white area. “There was nothing to te tell us that being a person of co colour was a good thing.” Evaristo chose to take the N Norton Anthology of Poetry an and a hologram of her husband David as her lu luxury items. Her discs in included I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free by Nina Simone. Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 today, 11am