Ciaran Duncan

In a city not short on spaces that can feel intimidating, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is especially prominent. Here is where Oxford’s students file in for their Graduation ceremonies. Where we talk about cultural gatekeepers, the Sheldonian is an especially well-established one–designed by the architect Christopher Wren to resemble a Roman theatre, with a (rather good) Siegfried Sassoon poem set in and named after it. What a pleasure, then, to see this space filled not by a parade of gowns competing for attention with the imposing baroque painted ceiling, but by the 2019 Booker Prize-winner, and longstanding Writers Make Worlds author, Bernardine Evaristo.

Evaristo is a writer and academic in possession of sharp intellect and passionate clarity of communication and this was in clear evidence in her 22 June Friends of the Bodleian talk, entitled “Bridging the Gap”. In it, she offered a virtuosic tour of postwar Black British literary history before zooming in on the literary landscape of 2023. Her through-line was the contribution of black female authors and their extra struggle to be heard and promoted, something she has directly experienced as well as studied.

Indeed, Evaristo’s talk was studded with personal testimony. She recalled how a top UK agent told her that her novel Mr Loverman (2013) was “too niche” (read: “black and queer”) to find success. This anecdote left me nearly tearing my hair out since that novel means a lot to me for the way it avoids the pattern of many successful queer novels which depict coming-of-age stories heavily focused on trauma and often lacking in any trace of humour. Evaristo is always keen to twist agilely away from stereotyping. For instance, she says she is often told in interviews that her most celebrated book Girl, Woman, Other (2019) is “a novel about race”. Why not consider it a novel “about” relationships or generational divides instead or as well? she asked.

In Evaristo’s account of modern Black British literary history, especial and due prominence was given to Buchi Emecheta, the trailblazing author whose life straddled Nigeria and Britain. Back in the 1970s and 80s, Emecheta’s work afforded Evaristo her introduction to books about black women’s lives. Of particular importance to her were Emecheta’s second novel Second Class Citizen (1974) and, above all, her later work The Joys of Motherhood (1979). That latter novel offers an indelible portrayal of an Igbo woman’s experience of working-class colonial Nigeria. Evaristo makes the case for this as an equally ground-breaking “female counterpart” to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), an unforgettable novel, now a classic, and, perhaps more than any other, a staple of postcolonial literature courses and reading lists everywhere. Evaristo drew her audience’s attention to the fact that so often the books taken as representatives of a period or movement are those authored by men. For instance, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is often talked about as “the” novel of the Windrush generation (and rather less discussed for its limited portrayal of female characters). Evaristo is not one to let any form of marginalisation go ignored and unexplored.

After discussing the intervening contributions of the likes of Andrea Levy and Judith Bryan, Evaristo homed in on the “lovely flourishing” of books by Black women that has occurred in Britain over the last few years. Here she highlighted in detail four novels published in 2023 that she has enjoyed; Writers Make Worlds author Diana Evans’ fourth novel, A House for Alice, the sequel to her award-winning Ordinary People, and set in the aftermath of the Grenfell tragedy; Jacqueline Crooks’ debut, Fire Rush, which explores the relationships between young black Brits amidst the 1970s dub reggae scene, and has already been shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction; The List by Yomi Adegoke, which ambivalently explores the impact of social media allegations in the age of MeToo, and which Evaristo commended for its “entertaining versatility” of voices; and, finally, the founder of the pioneering gal-dem magazine Liv Little’s Rosewater, which for Evaristo marks “a generational first” in its “sexy and bodacious” portrayal of a young queer black woman in London. Noticeably, in the case of The List and Rosewater, she picks out qualities redolent of her own many-voiced mosaic of a novel Girl, Woman, Other. In Evaristo’s own words, GWO’s 2019 Booker Prize win has catapulted her from “Bernardine who?!” to “Bernardine, we’re so honoured to meet you!”. As well as rocket-fuelling her sales, the win gave her the platform that she used so judiciously in her talk to both recognise the women who have come before her, and spotlight her younger contemporaries who are helping to make this such an exciting time to be a reader.

In the post-lecture Q&A especially, Evaristo was sharp-eyed on the institutional underpinnings–the publishing industry, libraries, schools–that heavily influence who is read, studied and canonised. She described London’s Woolwich library as “the making of me” as a child. She referred to the Runnymede Trust’s 2021 report, Lit In Colour, which found that, at that time, fewer than 1% of students at GCSE studied a book by a writer of colour. Essentially, it is still possible to go through the entire UK education system being given only books by white writers. Finally, Evaristo discussed the Black Britain Writing Back series–“a huge passion project of mine”–that she has curated with Penguin and that has reissued landmark works by the likes of Beryl Gilroy and C.L.R. James.

Generous with enthusiasm and intellect, the overriding impression her talk left is one of life lived as a major passion project and a relationship to other people and language that is playful, curious and always open to new possibilities. Whether you look to novels for beauty or learning, community or self-interrogation, listening to Evaristo can only foster a sense of excitement at the further “lovely flourishing” to come if readers and writers manage to sustain the momentum behind Black British women’s writing. 

Cite this: Duncan, Ciaran. “Sustaining the Momentum: Bernardine Evaristo speaks at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, 22 June 2023.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2023, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-evaristo-bridging-the-gap-sheldonian. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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In conversation with Dr Zoe Norridge and Marsha Hutchinson, Bernardine Evaristo reads from and discusses her remarkable verse novel, The Emperor’s Babe (2001), which tells the story of a African girl growing up in Roman London in 211 AD.

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Ed Dodson

In the post-war British context, the term ‘postcolonial’ has often been applied to Black and Asian writers. General surveys of post-war or contemporary British literature frequently use ‘postcolonial’ as a euphemism for ‘non-white’, and this becomes a way of lumping all such writers under one heading.

Andrzej Gasiorek, in Post-War British Fiction (1995), restricts his discussion of ‘colonialism’ to V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming, and of ‘post-colonialism’ to Salman Rushdie. Peter Childs, in Contemporary Novelists (2005), associates ‘Britain’s imperial past and post-colonial present’ with the familiar triad of ‘Rushdie, [Hanif] Kureishi, and [Zadie] Smith’. Nick Bentley, in Contemporary British Fiction (2008), connects ‘the multiethnic nature of contemporary Britain’ to these three, as well as Monica Ali, Courttia Newland, and Caryl Phillips. Brian Finney, in English Fiction Since 1984 (2006), places all of the non-white writers he discusses (Rushdie, Kureishi, and Kazuo Ishiguro) in a section entitled ‘National Cultures and Hybrid Narrative Modes’.

Such literary categorisations are often tied to authors’ biographies. This is true for gender and sexuality as much as for race. Most of the writers above, who are sometimes called ‘Black British’ writers, have their roots in British colonies, past and present. As a result, they are perceived to have a particular investment in ‘postcolonial’ questions of race and empire. This is a perception that is often, but by no means always, true.

Numerous contemporary writers and critics have complained about the ghettoisation of Black and Asian literature within Britain. In Bernardine Evaristo’s words, ‘If you are a black writer you are deemed to be writing about black subjects and that is generally perceived to be for a black audience’. According to Aminatta Forna:

I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer. We hyphenated writers complain about the privilege accorded to the white male writer, he who dominates the western canon and is the only one called simply ‘writer’.

There are a number of ways to tackle this question of naming. One is to expand the definition of ‘postcolonial’ beyond the confines of race: to read white writers as postcolonial, too. Several critics have argued that white writers from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Irvine Welsh or Bernard MacLaverty, for instance) might also be considered postcolonial, or at least brought into postcolonial conversations. A parallel is suggested here between the ‘peripheries’ of the empire and the ‘peripheries’ of the UK, especially in the era of devolution.

An alternative and complementary solution would be, as Timothy Ogene argues, ‘to momentarily de-postcolonize’ the work of writers like Evaristo and Forna by discussing their writing outside of the frames of race and empire.

Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds brings together Black and Asian writers in and around the UK but without foregrounding their racial identities or imposing postcolonial themes on their work. At the same time, as the project title suggests, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not being discarded entirely.

The question we are left with is: what is the role of ‘postcolonial’ as a label today? It is, after all, fifty or so years after the major processes of decolonisation. Is postcolonialism still an effective tool for addressing contemporary writing in Britain produced by a range of writers from many different cultural backgrounds?

Cite this: Dodson, Ed. “The Postcolonial ‘Ghetto’?” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Evaristo’s work spans times, places, and literary genres, often exploring what she has called ‘the hidden narratives of the African diaspora’ and ‘cross[ing] the borders of genre, race, culture, history, and […] sexuality’. From The Emperor’s Babe (2001), set in multicultural Roman London in the 3^rd century CE, to the semi-autobiographical Lara, which traces its path across seven generations and three continents, Evaristo’s work reimagines neglected histories in vibrant, evocative ways. Challenging the reader to contemplate the past and its legacy in the present, Blonde Roots (2008) inverts the racial dynamics of the transatlantic slave trade, depicting a world in which Europeans are enslaved by Africans, while her most recent novel, Mr Loverman (2013), examines sexuality and societal pressures through the experience of her Antiguan-born, London-living protagonist.

Bernardine Evaristo (Photo: Hayley Madden)

Adeptly combining verse and prose, Evaristo’s writing defies easy categorisation in a way that simultaneously reflects the refusal of her characters to be pigeon-holed into one, singular identity. She has made the form of the ‘verse novel’ her own, utilising her earlier experience of theatre and performance to infuse her work with a rhythm, tone, and voice that allows her writing to straddle the boundaries between the written and the spoken word. As author Ali Smith has observed, ‘Bernardine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life’.

—Justine McConnell, 2017

Cite this: McConnell, Justine. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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This extract comes from p. 3 of Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (Penguin edition, 2002). The text is fully annotatable: highlight any portion to add your own thoughts.

Who do you love? Who do you love,
when the man you married goes off

for months on end, quelling rebellions
at the frontiers, or playing hot-shot senator in Rome;

his flashy villa on the Palatine Hill, home
to another woman, I hear,

one who has borne him offspring.
My days are spent roaming this house,

its vast mosaic walls full of the scenes on Olympus,
for my husband loves melodrama.

They say his mistress is an actress,
a flaxen-Fräulein type, from Germania Superior.

Oh, everyone envied me, Illa Bella Negreeta!
born in the back of a shop on Gracechurch Street,

who got hitched to a Roman nobleman,
whose parents sailed out of Khartoum on a barge,

no burnished throne, no poop of beaten gold,
but packed with vomiting brats

and cows releasing warm turds
on to their bare feet. Thus perfumed,

they made it to Londinium on a donkey,
with only a thin purse and a fat dream.

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The Emperor’s Babe, Bernardine Evaristo’s comic verse-epic or novel-in-verse, told in erratically un-rhyming couplets, pays heed to Britain’s long history of cultural mixing and colonization on home ground.

Evaristo tells the feisty tale of a third-century African-British woman in Roman London, ‘Illa Bella Negreeta’, ‘whose parents sailed out of Khartoum on [an un-Shakespearian] barge’, making it to their west, to Londinium, on a very biblical donkey. As this knowing or ‘sautéed’ mélange of iconic motifs suggests, the conjunction of peoples in a teeming city produces powerfully transformative mixes and encounters, which for the spirited, punning Zuleika take the particular shape of her passionate if doomed affair with the Emperor Septimius Severus, himself of North African descent.

Context and history

Diverse Roman Britain

From David Olusoga, Black and British:
A Forgotten History

In a 2001 interview with Alastair Niven in Wasafiri, Bernardine Evaristo said of her motivation to write The Emperor’s Babe:

The Romans were travelling all over the place and they were also going backwards and forwards so why is it so difficult for people to think that black people could be in London 2000 years ago. […] I like the idea of exploding the myth of Britain as monocultural and pure until 1948 […].

Historians agree. Peter Fryer notes that ‘There were Africans in Britain before the English came here’. Mary Beard, responding to a recent social media controversy on the subject, observes:

One thing is for sure, the Roman empire – Britain included – was cultural and ethnically diverse, from the Syrians in Bath, to Quintus Lollius Urbicus, the Ethiopian who met Septimius Severus on Hadrian’s Wall and the wonderful couple from South Shields, Barates and Queenie (‘Regina’), he from Palmyra, she an Essex girl.

Cite this: “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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