BBC sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening. My castaway this week is the writer Bernardine Evaristo. Last year, she won the Booker Prize with her eighth novel, Girl Woman Other.

It was an historic victory. She's the first black British author to receive the trophy for her. It was also the manifestation of a decades old dream challenging herself to set an unrealistic goal. Early in her career, she had chosen to visualize winning the prize whether she'd imagined commanding the attention of a former U.S. president during his downtime. I can't see. In any case, Barack Obama is also a fan. He named Girl One another as one of his favorite reads of 2019.

She describes herself as uncompromising, which has come in handy. Her 38 year career in the arts as a critically acclaimed playwright, poet and author has run in parallel to her life as an activist growing up in a large British Nigerian family in Woolwich. She was a voracious reader, but theatre was her first love. And on graduating from drama school, she founded Britain's first Black Women's Theatre Company.

She says, I feel very subversive. As a writer. I write the stories I feel need to be out there defying stereotypes and writing into the absences that have prevailed. Bernardine Evaristo, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Thank you so much. It's so good to be here.

So girl, woman mother tells the story of 12 characters, mostly women of color living in Britain, and their ages range from 19 to 93. It's a beautifully complex narrative, but what was your aim when you started writing it?

I wanted to write a book that had as many black British women in it as possible because there were so few of us getting published. And so we just weren't really present in British fiction or fiction anywhere in the world, to be honest. So I thought, okay, I'm going to put 12 women in a novel and see how that works out.

The book at the top of the charts in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. How did it feel to see your writing connect not just with readers, but with our times in that way?

It's astonishing, to be honest, to think that this book has become a bestseller, because in my mind, it's it's a book that I wrote when very few people knew my work. And it's very much the kind of book I would write, which is, I think, radical and experimental. There are a lot of women on the spectrum in the novel, a quarter of them, in fact. And so for it to then make the bestseller lists and then to reach number one and stay there for quite a while was surreal.

Is the power of the book essentially. So it's good. It feels like these characters, who most of them readers won't really have met before in fiction, it feels like they're going out there into the world and they're becoming known. And so black British women are becoming known. And I think that's a really positive thing.

We're on the radio, so our listeners will have to imagine your personal aesthetic. But I know that it's vivid, colorful and flamboyant. And you've said that it's important to you. It's a visual statement of who you are as a woman in the creative arts. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

I do wear extremely colourful clothes, and the older I get, the more colorful I become.

I think when I was growing up, you know, we were a mixed race family in a very white area. And we stood out because we were black children and it wasn't a positive thing. And then at some point I decided I was going to just make a virtue of it and to dress in a flamboyant way. And in the last few years, I really decided to wear colourful clothes because I think we should anyway. But also, I don't want to hide who I am.

I want to be noticed. And I think one of the ways in which we can do that is by how we present ourselves visually to the world. And also, I don't want to look like everybody else that's dealt with your first desk.

What are we going to hear? Malaika, which is a classic Swahili song and I've chosen the version sung by Angelique Kidjo. And I love Angelique Kidjo.

And it's a song that I think it comes out of the 50s and it's so full of love and yearning. And it's just the most beautiful song, Malaika.

Now, Bhupinder, Monica. Malakas. Now, Goobang, Monica Nikou. Multi-way younger up.

Just not seeing it, I'm money, you know, with Ankita and Malaika, Bernardine Evaristo, you've said there was nothing in my childhood that said I could be a writer.

So what did it say? Oh, interesting question. Well, my mother was a school teacher and I did go to grammar school, so I guess I guess that would have been an option for me. And in fact, my elder sister did go on to become a teacher and also a deputy headmistress. But there were there were no role models for me in terms of being a black British girl in the society around me, really.

I went to the U.S. when I was 12 and that changed my life.

And I kind of wonder what would have happened if I hadn't have done that because I might have been a bit directionless.

What were your aspirations as a little girl? What did you want to be? A nun? A nun? That's OK. Because your mom was Catholic? Yes. Oh, yes. I was very indoctrinated.

We used to go to church every Sunday and I used to go to confession and confess my sins. And I believe to all I stop going to church when I was 15, when we saw I come from a large family of eight kids, and when each of us reached the age of 15, my mother said, you can now make your own decision about whether or not you continue going to church and every single one of us stop going.

So there's 10 of you in the house and must have been a very busy house with all those people in it. Tell us a little bit about growing up there.

It was it was a very busy house. My parents bought it in 1960 for 2000 pounds, and it was a big old Victorian house with five bedrooms and two reception rooms. So there was space for us. We each shared a room with one other member of the family. We didn't have any money. And my dad was the kind of person who would start things and not finish them. Most of the time we had bare floorboards and walls that were on paper, but it was a creaking, drafty old building.

But it could hold us all. Your dad had moved over from Nigeria.

How much did you know about his roots there?

Almost nothing. He didn't tell us anything. He he said later on that he wanted us to grow up as English children, and so it wouldn't be wise for him to tell us about his past or to pass on his language, which was Uraba. And so he was a mystery, actually. And also my father didn't talk to us. He disciplined us and he told us off, but he didn't really chat to us.

Do you think he was scared for you? Absolutely scared for us, absolutely. He had eight children, four boys, four girls at a time when there was a lot of racism on the streets before the Race Relations Act. So he had children in a society where it was kind of okay to be racist and he had to protect us.

What did that dearth of knowledge mean to you, the kind of thing a kid could project into from their own imagination if they were so minded? Yes.

Well, I think I think we probably I mean, I took for myself I think I probably saw Africa in the way that Africa was seen back then and perhaps is seen by people today, which is that it was somewhere uncivilized and savage and not somewhere to be proud of. And my father was a very dark skinned black man. And I remember when I was about maybe about 11, seeing him walking down the street towards me and I crossed the road because I didn't want to say hello to him, because I didn't want to be associated with him.

I mean, that feels terrible now, but that's that's what it was like, because growing up in the 60s and 70s, in a very white area, there was nothing around us to tell us that being a person of color was a good thing.

Let's take a minute for some music. It's your second disc. What is it and why have you chosen it today?

So Fela Kuti love Fela Kuti have always love Fela Kuti. And the track is zombi. And even though my father was distant and the disciplinarian in the 1970s, he would have parties. My mother and father would have parties and they'd bring their Nigerian friends in.

The Nigerian friends are always married to white women.

My mother was white, is a white woman, and they would play King Sunny Day and other African high life musicians. And also Fela Kuti and my dad's friends would dance with us, the girls in the family. And we kind of enjoyed the parties, but we didn't like dancing with them because the tracks would go on for about half an hour.

So if your dad's old mate wanted to dance with you, it would go on and on and on.

But now, listening to Fela Kuti, I love his long tracks because you just enjoy it.

Fela Kuti and zombie Bernardine Evaristo, the world that you describe as a child sounds quite constrained before you got to youth theater. The first escape that you found, I think, was like many kids of your generation and in your circumstances was books from the local library. So Woolwich library.

Oh, I loved it. Loved it so much. I would go down to the library every Saturday and pick up two or three books and read them during the week. And the books opened up the world to me and they were a form of entertainment because I wasn't going anywhere. I just immersed myself in books and I was a good reader and it was free. We didn't have many books in the house. We had like a tiny, tiny bookshelf with some very old books.

I don't know what they were.

Is it true that you used to read on the walk to school? Oh, yeah, I did. Maybe for two reasons. One was that I just got into the stories I was reading and was really didn't want to put them down in the same way that I've seen students of mine walking through campus at the university where I teach reading from a computer as they walk along.

Can't quite believe that when I used to do it with the book. And also I was quite shy. So it was a way, I think, to cut out what was going on around me and just to focus on what was in front of me. And I remember reading routes when I was 15, which was the epic novel about slavery, and there was an accompanying television series in 1975. And I remember getting that book and reading it. And that made a really lasting impression because that was actually the first black book I read because the other books were all white books, because that's what was around at the time.

You didn't try to write though, or fancy yourself a writer one day. Why not?

No, not at all. I don't know. I mean, I guess it just wasn't even something that was possible. You know, if you come from a working class background, it's not an option, is it? Unless somehow you get to know somebody or you have a teacher at school who presents it as an option.

I didn't know any writers and as a young child thinking about careers, which I wasn't doing anyway.

But, you know, apart from being nun, it's like you're just thinking of like what?

How do you earn a living? And writing is not uppermost in the minds of children who are not in that kind of culture.

So as you said, it was acting rather than writing that that captured you as a teenager. What was it about that?

I went to the local youth theater, grannies, young people's theater, that's what it was called. And it was about 10 minute walk from my house and it was in a big old church. And I just absolutely loved it from the pretty much from the minute I walked in the door, it was fun. I think that's what it is. When you were a child, when you're acting, it's not about wanting to be a great performer. I have no memory of wanting to be a great performer.

At the beginning, I just wanted to go there because it was almost like going to a community center and doing all kinds of games and performances and singing and running around and getting on with each other. I just remember it being a very freeing experience for me.

It's time to take a break for some music. This is your third disc today. What are we going to hear and why?

Well, Sweet Honey in the Rock, one of my favorite time groups, a cappella African-American women's group, very feminist and very political and spiritual.

So the song I've chosen is called Breath's, which is, I think, a beautifully spiritual song. And it's kind of about the ancestors. And I think when I'm on an island, it's just going to remind me of the people. I've known some more things than I'd be missing, more things than the ancestors. But when the final voice is the ancestors were in the voice of the Lord.

Oh, sweet honey in the rock and breaths, Bernardine Evaristo, you left home at 18 to live with your boyfriend and after a year out working at the BBC World Service, he then went to drama school.

It was the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, and that was where he began writing. Tell us about your first play, described by the principal as the best piece of theatre he'd ever seen.

He did, and it was really short and it was basically an explosion of rage. It was called the N-word. And I jump onto the stage and I shout that word out really loudly. And then I say something like to black, not black enough to white, not white enough, and then some other things and then jump off the stage. So it was really short and it was probably very powerful.

Yeah, obviously hugely shocking and powerful. Now, obviously, his response to it was very positive, but I hadn't seen anything like it before.

It really was a very vicious word then. And I was basically saying, this is how I'm seen. This is what I might be called, but where do I stand? Because I'm a mixed race person.

I'm not a very sophisticated piece of theatre.

But Punchy, you've described yourself raging against the machine in your 20s. So you were a force to be reckoned with back then?

Well, not really. I mean, I like to think I was, but I was a kid, you know, it just feels that I was so young.

But, you know, we formed there to black women myself, Patricia Central ER and Paulette Randall. We started the company literally the day we left from school. We had no experience and we just said we're not going to get any work because there is no work for us.

We felt that we weren't accepted by the mainstream and it was very much for us to create the story and control the story and to put it out there into the kinds of venues that would attract people who would be interested in our work.

That first play that you'd written, which was about being mixed race, I wonder about that facet of who you are and to what extent you've been able to kind of reconcile that and find and create representation for for yourself and perhaps for people like you.

Yes, it was an issue, I would say, because growing up we were called in the 60s and 70s, half caste, and that didn't feel like an insult. That was what mixed race people were called. And then eventually it became a mixed race. They were identity issues about, you know, do I really fit into any kind of black culture when I have a white mother?

And I wasn't always welcome either in black spaces because I was mixed race.

And actually all of that changed when I wrote my second book, Laura, which is based on my family history. And I went into both sides of my family history. I went back to my father's childhood, his ancestors background in Brazil, and I went back to my mother's childhood and her heritage in Ireland and eventually Germany and looked at what it was like to grow up mixed race. And through writing that book, which is a novel in verse fictionalized version of my family history, I reconciled my identity.

And I've never looked back from that.

I identify as a black woman and I'm happy to claim that as my identity. And within that, I'm also a mixed race woman. Or you might say biracial or whatever term is around that comes in the future.

And I'm very solid in it.

It's time to go to the music. Bernadin What are we going to hear next? Nina Simone, one of my favorite singers and this song, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, is a song that still touches my heart today.

And when I was working with black women and Patricia Santaolalla and myself were putting on a production called Silhouettes, we co-written it and we were both performing in it. It was a two hander. We used to play this song just before the curtain went up, metaphorically speaking, because there were no curtains, because we played in community centres and libraries and so on.

But we would be out of sight of the audience and this song would come on and Patricia and I would be miming the song and dancing and then we'd go on stage.

I wish I knew it would feel to be free and we could be all chains holding me.

I wish I could say all the things that I should say, say out loud and clear, the whole Roundwood. I wish I could share all the love that you know. All the parts that keep us apart. I wish you could know what it means to be me and you'd see and agree that every man should be free. I wish I could meet this woman and I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.

Bernardine Evaristo, you described the 80s as the heyday of your lesbian era.

What were you learning about yourself at the time? I knew that was coming. Yeah, it was.

I had fun and I was very angry. I was very angry as a woman, you know, because I'm feeling like an outsider and sort of understanding how the patriarchy worked and being angry at the injustices against women and then seeing how the feminist movement worked. And that was kind of quite exclusionary and didn't really accommodate black women. And I had a period of about 10 years where I lived as a lesbian and that was my identity. And I used to go on lesbian marches and I used to go clubbing and I had lots of relationships.

I was very much part of this countercultural black feminist say, or black womanist community where we were just nurturing each other as well as fighting each other and falling out, of course, and creating our own artistic product so that when I left that behind, I was in a sense very strong as an artist because I had found I had found myself as an artist in a space where there was nobody telling me I couldn't do what I wanted to do and where putting black women at the center was totally normal and accepted.

And just to say that in the 80s, a lot of Asian women also identified as black.

So when I say black, I'm actually being very inclusive of a wider range of women of color.

You wrote about your younger self that anger is a default. Emotion leads to self-immolation. I wonder how important it was for you, for your self-preservation to to change your outlook, to modify that.

Yes. I was angry in my early 20s, I have to say. But definitely by the time I got to my 30s, I didn't feel anger. I think that's that's really wise. And I turned the anger into energy. I wouldn't be writing if I was angry. I'm passionate and I care about things and I try to make a difference. But what's driving me is not anger anymore. It's energy. And I think that's very positive.

It's time for your next desk. Bernadin. What are we going to hear today and why?

I first listen to Osby in the 70s and the song is called Wijaya, which means we keep going and it's about wanting to get somewhere but not knowing how you're going to get there.

And I started listening to this song after quite a big gap when I was nominated for the Booker and it became my kind of Booker anthem because of the lyrics and the day of the Booker. I had some booker.

This was a couple of hours before the ceremony because I was so nervous and I was I put this music on and I was listening to the words and I was singing it and I was dancing around the room.

And it means so much to me because I reached this place after so long for. On CBS and we're going to Bernardine Evaristo, you were already an award winning author by last year, but of course nothing compares to the book. How did it feel the moment you heard the news that you'd won?

I released a stream of expletives. I literally swore the house down.

It was so astonishing and exhilarating. You know, the build up to it that day had been enormous. And then there's a big banquet and it just goes on and on and on.

And then at 10:00, the announcement is made and the chair of the judges announced Margaret Atwood, and he said, and it's going to be two.

And I was like, oh, my God, he's going to be the second person.

And the truth is, I wanted that prize so much. I can't be cool about it. I cannot be cool about it. Tell the truth, this is Desert Island is absolutely I wanted it so much because I knew it was going to change everything. And so when he said my name, the room exploded, which was really nice. And then I got up and Margaret got up and she kind of gave me a hug. I think we walked onto the stage hand in hand.

Yes. And then she also gave me the podium. I just thought, wow, that's so generous and so sweet. And my feet haven't really touched the ground ever since.

Much has been written about the fact that you're the first woman of color in the first black British author to win the prize. But you're also sharing it. I wonder how you felt about that at the time and how you feel looking back.

I don't think I could have been any less happy if I have won on my own. To be honest, I will take the Booker Prize any way it comes. For a start, I'm just happy to have it. And also, she is such a phenomenal woman. I get what other people see people from outside who think we are the first black woman who should a girl on your own.

And if I wasn't the person who got it, I might think that.

But in terms of my feelings, I don't think I would feel any difference because it kind of feels like I have won it on my own because we've both won it separately.

We're not sharing a trophy. We have both won it.

And as you say, you know, it has changed everything for you. How do you greet that kind of new ultra visibility?

I really appreciate the fact that I have a much bigger platform for my activism.

So whereas before hardly anyone was listening to me, now I just put out a tweet and suddenly it's a quote in a newspaper.

I'm not. Oh, right. I have the power. And, you know, I am about my community, my rights and community. And so I do continue to promote other writers.

And when it comes to your activism, Bernadin, how important to you is it that you're now part of the literary establishment is very good?

I like it. Actually. I haven't compromised my politics or my creativity. I feel very much right now in the center of things, but I'm hopefully changing it from within. And I think we have to be inside the establishment as well as doing what we do outside of it. Let's have some more music.

Bernazard, what are we going to hear next and why have you chosen this today? So, Keith Jarrett, I heard him play in the late 70s and I just loved his piano playing.

The album that I've chosen is from the The Concert, and it just takes me on an emotional journey every time I listen to it. So forty years later, I still find that I am emotionally touched by it. And I think that is great art.

Keith Jarrett from part one of the Callon concert, Bernardine Evaristo. You're a professor of creative writing now and you tell your students if writers want lifelong careers, they need to be unstoppable before the critical acclaim arrived for you.

How did you get there? I I did what I love doing, first of all, it was the theater and then it was becoming a writer and publishing books and finding ways to support myself by working in arts management and then eventually having a portfolio career. I still do write book reviews. I write essays. I do a lot of touring, which is paid, but it's all around literature. And in that way I was able to support my passion.

And I think the key to becoming unstoppable is to do what you love doing and to develop your skills and to never give up.

It's time to hear your penultimate disc. What's it going to be? It's Bob Dylan and the song is Things Have Changed. And I chose it because of my husband.

So he is a huge Bob Dylan fan. And so I've heard a lot of Bob Dylan since we've been together since 2006.

And this is one of the songs that we enjoy together and we actually sort of dance around to it.

And the problem is, my husband is a comedy dancer. He never dances seriously.

So I'm starting to lose my ability to dance in rhythm because the person I dance most with is somebody who just mucks about. But anyway, this is his favorite Bob Dylan song and I enjoy it, too.

So it's for David standing on the gallows with my. Bob Dylan and things have changed for your husband, David Bernardine Evaristo, we talked about you being a professor of creative writing at Brunel University and you're one of only 26 in the U.K. of 20000 professors who are black women. And I wonder about that challenge to pass the baton on for better representation, not just when it comes to ethnicity and gender, but class as well.

And whose job is coming up with solutions to that? Because I know that, like the writer Marlon James, you've talked about having done your time on diversity panels.

No, I'm not doing any more diversity panels, but I can drop tweets, though, which have even more impact. Actually, there's two things going on. One is the people who most care about change are the people who are most adversely affected by the status quo.

And the other thing is that the people who can make the biggest difference are the people in positions of power, and they are the people who may not feel that they are directly adversely affected by the fact that people have been excluded.

If we're talking about race, for example, white people need to be on board and to be at least party to the conversations we have around race, because what happens is when suddenly there is an explosion of Black Lives Matter or whatever else, the institutions then start saying, OK, we're not doing very well in terms of exclusivity, help us.

What do we do? What do we do?

But actually, they know what to do. And if they don't know what to do, they need to work it out. Because if the door is sharp, what do you do? You open that door. Yet the reality is that the onus is always put on us, the people who have been shut out to try and find a way in. And sometimes it's just not possible.

Sometimes the castle doors are just firmly shut. So the door and this door open from the inside.

Time for one more desk before we send you to the island. What are we going to hear? Anything. Public enemy fight. The power is about activism. It's about protest. It's stirring. It's energizing. It's celebratory. I think it's a kind of activist anthem. And I absolutely love this song. 99, there's no drama for. Listen to your swinger's while I'm singing, and once again, knowing what I know in the Black Panthers, witness in the river rolling down to give us what we want.

Oh, God, give us what we need. Oh, freedom of freedom that we got the fight, the powers that be. The power to power. Public Enemy and Fight the Power, Bernardine Evaristo, it's time to cast you away to your island. You'll be separated from friends, family and life as you know it.

How do you feel about the prospect? I will make the best of it. I will use the time to reflect and to become very spiritual and extremely healthy.

Lots of exercise, lots of yoga and lots of time to contemplate.

We'll give you the books to take with you the complete works of Shakespeare, the Bible and a book of your own choosing. What will you go for?

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, which covers a thousand years of verse and has nearly 2000 poems in it. So it'll keep me mentally agile. And it will also be very good for my writing because I don't read enough poetry these days.

You can also have a luxury item. What would you like? A hologram of my husband and I can just talk to him. Don't say no.

You can talk at him you won't be able to communicate with. I can imagine though. OK, I think that's OK.

And finally, if you had to save just one of the eight disks that you shared with us today from the ravages of island life, which would you go for?

It's got to be Keith Jarrett's the Cohen concert. I never, never tire of it.

Bernardine Evaristo, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you.

I'm rather taken with the idea of Bernadin working her way through 1000 years of poetry while on her island, I hope she doesn't find the hologram of David too distracting. Bernadin is one of many Booker Prize winning authors who've been cast away. In addition to Margaret Atwood, you'll also find Marlon James Unwrite, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Pat Barker in the Desert Island Discs back catalogue, all available to listen to via BBC. Next time my guest will be Yusuf Cat Stevens.

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