Author Evaristo 'astonished' to receive one-off £100k prize
Trailblazing author Bernardine Evaristo has said she is "astonished" to have been honoured with a one-off outstanding contribution award to mark the 30th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Evaristo, who was the first black woman to win the prestigious Booker Prize when the award was shared with Margaret Atwood in 2019, told the BBC: "This [prize] wasn't on anyone's radar... I feel very blessed."
The accolade is in honour of her career's work - which includes her Booker-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other - and her long-running advocacy for inclusion and diversity in the arts.
Evaristo will receive £100,000 prize money and a sculpture.
Both will be presented on 12 June at a ceremony in London, where the winners of the 2025 Women's Prizes for Fiction and Non-Fiction will also be announced.
Evaristo said she would put the prize money into a project to support other women writers, and will give more details in the autumn.
"I'm not doing it because I'm a multi-millionaire," she joked. "It just feels right to put back in. We should support each other."
The writer said it was "incredibly validating" that her advocacy work had been recognised by the Women's Prize body.
"Women's fiction was in a very bad place when it [the Prize charity] began. Every year it's shone a light... and helped to amplify women's voices."
Evaristo co-founded Britain's first black women's theatre company, Theatre of Black Women, which ran from 1982 to 1988.
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She also set up the Spread the Word writers' development agency, the Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour, and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, among other projects. She was made an MBE in 2009 for services to literature.
The 66-year-old said she began her activism work in the 1980s "simply because there was a need for it".
"At that time, it's not something I saw as separate to my creativity. I did it because I knew I wanted to take responsibility, to be the change I wanted to see. I did it because it needed to be done."
It's important not to rest on your laurels because "if we don't keep up momentum, the status quo might close in on itself again", she said.
"It's not something where we can say 'We've achieved this, we can drop it'."
She said there was a current "backlash against freedoms women had earned over a century".
