Bernardine Evaristo receives Women's Prize outstanding contribution award
The trust is known for the Women's Prize for Fiction, a popular literary award that was established in 1996.
Evaristo, 66, who was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 for her novel Girl, Woman, Other, will be presented with the award and £100,000 prize money on June 12 at the Women's Prize Trust's summer party in London.
She said: 'I am completely overwhelmed and overjoyed to receive this unique award.
'I feel such deep gratitude towards the Women's Prize for honouring me in this way.
'Over the last three decades I have witnessed with great admiration and respect how the Women's Prize for Fiction has so bravely and brilliantly championed and developed women's writing, always from an inclusive stance.
'The financial reward comes as an unexpected blessing in my life and, given the mission of the Women's Prize Trust, it seems fitting that I spend this substantial sum supporting other women writers; more details on this will be forthcoming.'
Evaristo will be honoured alongside the winners of the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction and the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, which was won by V V Ganeshananthan and Naomi Klein respectively, last year.
Authors who have been longlisted or won the Women's Prize for Fiction over the past three decades, and had published a minimum of five books, were eligible for the outstanding contribution award.
The winner of the outstanding contribution award was selected by a judging panel chaired by novelist and non-fiction author Kate Mosse, founder director of the Women's Prize for Fiction and Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.
She said: 'My fellow judges and I always knew it would be a tall order to choose just one author from the many exceptional contemporary writers who have made such a huge contribution in a world where women's voices are increasingly being silenced, where the arts and artists are under attack.
'Books encourage empathy, they offer alternative and diverse points of view; they help us to stand in other people's shoes and to see our own worlds in the mirror.
'In the end, we felt that Bernardine Evaristo's beautiful, ambitious and inventive body of work (which includes plays, poetry, essays, monologues and memoir as well as award-winning fiction), her dazzling skill and imagination, and her courage to take risks and offer readers a pathway into diverse and multifarious worlds over a forty-year career, made her the ideal recipient of the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award.'
The Women's Prize Trust says the one-off award marks the 30th anniversary year of the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Evaristo, who was born in Woolwich, south London, and is of Anglo-Nigerian descent, has shed light on the lives of modern British women through her work, taking an interest in the African diaspora.
She has launched several successful writing schemes to support women writers and under-represented writers of colour, including the Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets.
Several of her works, including The Emperor's Babe and Hello Mum, have been adapted into BBC Radio 4 plays.
Evaristo's other novels include Blonde Roots, Soul Tourists and Mr Loverman. The latter was turned into an eight-part BBC drama starring Lennie James and Ariyon Bakare.
The actors, who star as lovers struggling to go public with their relationship, picked up Baftas for their roles during the academy's TV awards in May.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Chimamanda has returned to fiction after 12 years. But is the author stuck in the 2010s?
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The Covid pandemic acts as a backdrop to the lives of four female protagonists, and between them there are the roiling affairs of the heart, disappointments and assaults and bodily wreckage whose collective toll starts to be felt, or 'counted', in middle age. The central figure is modelled on Nafissatou Diallo, who was allegedly assaulted in 2011 in a hotel room by the French economist Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It is a 'gesture of returned dignity', Adichie says in her author's note. But it is also an example of how the author always leans into the sharp and jagged realities of womanhood, with no desire to smooth its edges. Adichie is, above all, a a matter-of-fact narrator of bodily ravages: bad sex, small penises, postpartum injuries, fibroids and heavy bleeding. This is my favourite quality of Adichie's. She doesn't traffic in banalities or idealisation of Black women as poetically and magically tragic or noble. They just are. 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And there are on-the-nose statements where Adichie ventriloquises through characters that tone of clapback feminism. 'Dear men,' writes one of her characters in her blog where she dispenses satirical advice to men, 'I understand that you don't like abortion, but the best way to reduce abortion is if you take responsibility for where your male bodily fluids go.' There are also jarringly cartoonish portrayals of American, or Americanised, characters opining, which I interpreted as a jab at the smugness of 'woke' progressives, a cohort I suppose Adichie would like to distance herself from. The overarching feeling was of a book that was smaller than its writer. Adichie, as a talent, remains sharp and masterly, but as a social and political commentator, she sounds stranded. Perhaps one of the dangers of being an icon is the risk of one day becoming an artefact. To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.
Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
The 30 greatest fantasy books of all time
Fantasy gets a bad rap in the literary world: swords 'n' sandals, nerdy kids rolling 20-sided dice, cod-medieval hi-jinks, chain-mail bikinis. It's for children, right? The genre responsible for preserving more virginities than any amount of 'abstinence education'. Think again. Fantasy specialises, you could say, in quest motifs and worlds in which magic is an omnipresent technology. The oldest forms of human storytelling – myths, legends, folktales – belong to fantasy. It's a vast generic territory which traffics freely with the lands of science fiction, horror and historical fiction but pre-dates all of them. It has its potboilers, and its frequently racialised world-building is, in some cases, politically questionable; but it also has works of high literary merit and ideological complexity. As a literary editor, long-time fantasy reader and a historian, in my new book The Haunted Wood, of the fantasy-rich terrain of children's literature, here's my selection of 30 of the best fantastical reads. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman Cancelled though the author may be for sexual misbehaviour in his private life, Gaiman's comics series about the adventures of the Lord of Dreams remain a significant point in the progress of fantasy. Gaiman hops genre freely and has a magpie-like approach to the myth-kitty, plundering this pantheon and that for his cast of characters, reinventing Death as a cooler-than-thou teenage girl and Dreams as a cross between Julian Cope and Robert Smith from the Cure. It was described by Norman Mailer as 'a comic strip for intellectuals'. Buy the book The Belgariad by David Eddings David Eddings's five-volume saga, co-written with his wife Leigh, began with 1982's Pawn of Prophecy and served a captivating slice of trad fantasy storytelling. Gods, wizards, cloaks, magic orbs, and a humble protagonist with a grand destiny. It thrilled teenage me, and judging by its sales figures I wasn't, and am not, alone. Buy the book Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones The spry and prolific imagination of Diana Wynne Jones gave us many a work in the genre (including Howl's Moving Castle). Her seven-book Chrestomanci sequence, starting with 1977's Charmed Life, was a literary touchstone for JK Rowling and Philip Pullman. Here, Wynne Jones imagined what it would be like to have magic as a technology regulated by government; and set her story in a multiverse of which our own disenchanted world was also a part. She much deserves a revival. Buy the book The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey Is the vast cycle of books that McCaffrey began with 1968's Dragonflight science fiction, or fantasy? Hard to say. It's set on another planet in the far future, and involves time travel and terrors from outer space – but since it contains actual fire-breathing dragons, I plump for fantasy for the purposes of this list. Either way, it's a tremendous feat of world-building and long-form storytelling. Telepathic dragon-jockeys battle a rain of deadly fungus from outer space. Buy the book The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro Who says fantasy can't be classy? 2015 saw a future Nobel laureate dip his pen into the genre with a haunting post-Arthurian tale of dragons, ogres, Sir Gawain, and a mysterious 'mist' of collective amnesia. It's a slant national origin-story, and a love-story, and a characteristically riddling parable. Accused of looking down on the genre, Ishiguro was firm in declaring: 'I am on the side of the pixies and the dragons.' Buy the book The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski The adventures of Geralt of Rivia, a superpowered monster-hunter in a brutal cod-medieval world with complex and violent politics, were a cult hit in the author's native Poland before taking over the rest of the world – first via a superb series of Witcher videogames and then through a TV series in which Henry Cavill excellently inhabited the protagonist's square jaw and weird hairdo. Magic spells, slavering fiends, clashing swords and sexy sorceresses: it has it all. Buy the book The Dark Tower by Stephen King Beginning with 1982's The Gunslinger, the horror supremo's three-decade, 4,000-plus-page excursion into fantasy is at once a weirdly less-read part of his oeuvre, and the heart of it: the world-hopping story of its protagonist Roland's quest for the titular Dark Tower ties together the wider Stephen King multiverse. The Dark Tower is Stephen King Central Station, and he has called the books fragments of an 'uber-novel'. Like everything King writes, it's immersive, genre-bending and super readable. Buy the book The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster Norton Juster 's 1961 children's story, illustrated by the cartooning legend Jules Feiffer, tells the story of a bored little boy, Milo, who finds himself in possession of a magic tollbooth that teleports him to the Kingdom of Wisdom. A strange mash-up of Pilgrim's Progress and Gulliver's Travels and The Adventures of Pinocchio, it's full of droll absurdities and silly puns but it also describes Milo's awakening interest in the world and the life of the mind. An allegory that's too fly to be just an allegory. Buy the book Originally published in serial form in the comic 2000AD, Pat Mills's yarn about a berserker warrior using his axe Brainbiter to massacre (among others) very many Fomorian Fish-men joyously plundered the Celtic myth-kitty for its sardonic, ultra-violent fantasy pulp. The best bits were Sláine's battle-frenzies, aka 'warp-spasms', which saw our hero turning pirouettes in his own skin, gloriously rendered by artists including Glenn Fabry and Simon Bisley. There's dry humour, too, from Sláine's dwarf sidekick Ukko. It's a pretty sophisticated comic strip. Buy the book Conan the Barbarian by Robert E Howard Most of Robert E Howard's Conan stories were written for pulp magazines in the 1930s, but the titular Cimmerian warrior, raven-haired and quick with his sword, is one of the iconic figures in the genre and they have since been reprinted in any number of fat collected editions. The stories take place in the mythic 'Hyborian Age', after the drowning of Atlantis and before the rise of the ancient civilisations known to history, and though they are just as sexist as you'd expect from 1930s fiction – damsels are generally to be found in distress – they remain a milestone in pulp fantasy history. Buy the book The Epic of Gilgamesh (c2100 BC) by Anon Practically every ancient text – from the Book of Ezekiel to Homer's Odyssey – can be claimed for the fantasy genre. Realism is very much a Johnny-come-lately in literary history. The Epic of Gilgamesh stands at the fountainhead of the tradition: the original hero-wrestles-with-the-gods, road-trip, buddy-movie, quest-narrative, eco-parable, friends-we-made-along-the-way extravaganza. Buy the book Saga of the Exiles (1981-1984) by Julian May Fantasy/science fiction doesn't get more widescreen than Julian May's extraordinary sequence of books starting with 1981's The Many-Coloured Land. Raggle-taggle refugees from a 22nd-century galactic empire land up in Europe set six million years previously – to discover (along with our hairy ancestors) two warring factions of psychic aliens knocking about. The shenanigans that follow include an explanation for why the modern-day Mediterranean Sea became full of water in the first place. Buy the book Elidor (1965) by Alan Garner All of Alan Garner 's work is remarkable. He started squarely in the trad-fantasy idiom with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, but moved off into much odder and more fertile mythological terrain. Is The Owl Service fantasy? Is Red Shift? Is Treacle Walker? Yes and no. But a hinge between the traditional and experimental modes is his Elidor – in which the child protagonists find a portal to another world but the majority of the thrilling, chilling action takes place in this one. In Elidor, you could say, the wardrobe goes both ways – and that was a giant leap in the history of fantasy fiction. Buy the book The Dark Is Rising (1973) by Susan Cooper Susan Cooper's five-novel sequence is a landmark in modern fantasy. It's uneven – the first book Over Sea, Under Stone, is a bit Enid Blyton and a bit Dan Brown; the last one, Silver on the Tree, is kind of chaotic – but it's unforgettable. The second book has come to give its title to the series, which seems apt: here's where we first glimpse Cooper's extraordinary scheme of a centuries-long war between the Dark and the Light, and we meet Will Stanton, an 11-year-old boy of destiny. There are few novels that more excitingly introduce the classic fantasy trope of discovering that the fate of the cosmos depends on an apparently ordinary child. Buy the book Northern Lights (1995) by Philip Pullman Philip Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy – now supplemented by a second trilogy of prequel/sequels in the same universe – is an extraordinary piece of storytelling. It has all the narrative excitement you could want from an adventure story (Wicked villains! Armoured bears! Balloonists!) – but it's underpinned by some huge ideas about adulthood, identity, human freedom and the power of religion. Pullman showed us, or perhaps reminded us, that fantasy is a genre that can address some of the most fundamental human questions. Plus, he takes on CS Lewis and John Milton. Buy the book Jabberwocky (1872) by Lewis Carroll Who was the founding father of not only modern children's literature writing, but fantasy? Alice's Adventures in Wonderland may be Carroll's most enduring work, but his mini-epic Jabberwocky is the one that really hits the spot most squarely: a nonsense parody of a chivalric romance, where we know exactly what's going on even though two words in three are gibberish. It shows how deeply rooted those genre conventions of the monster-slaying hero are, and it's brilliantly funny and atmospheric and alive. The 'vorpal sword' (he says, shamefacedly consulting his dungeon-master's guide) is a staple of Dungeons and Dragons to this day. Buy the book Cerebus the Aardvark (1977–2004) by Dave Sim The Canadian comic book writer Dave Sim is less well-known than he deserves to be. What started out as a fairly thin Conan the Barbarian spoof (starring a bad-tempered, avaricious and amoral talking aardvark) became possibly the most sustained single-author story in any art form in modern history. There are thousands of pages of Cerebus, all independently published and aggregated in dozens of 'telephone directory' graphic novel collections. They meditate on history, statecraft, religion and philosophy, while including cameos from parodic versions of Groucho Marx, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Oscar Wilde. Plus, obviously, that talking aardvark. Some of it's wonderful; some of it, especially towards the end, is demented and extremely problematic. But there's nothing remotely like it. Buy the book Vurt (1993) by Jeff Noon Whether Jeff Noon's Vurt sequence belongs to science fiction or fantasy is up for debate, but I'm choosing to place it in fantasy: Noon isn't much interested in anything so tediously literal as science. Enraptured by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Vurt and its sequels posit a world in which by putting a feather in your mouth you can enter an alternative universe – part VR experience, part drug trip – and, perhaps, lose yourself or bring a Thing From Outer Space back. It's weird, horny, transgressive and exciting. Buy the book The Princess and the Goblin (1872) by George MacDonald This strange and compelling story, you could argue, made the modern fantasy genre possible. It contains a lonely princess, a sort of fairy godmother, a doughtily heroic working-class hero – and a bunch of malevolent goblins who have hard heads and soft feet and terrifying schemes for revenge. It takes fairytale tropes and wittily and fruitfully subverts them, sometimes to comic and even sinister effect. No less a figure than GK Chesterton said that it was the book that had 'made a difference to my whole existence'. Buy the book The Colour of Magic (1983) by Terry Pratchett Taking the mickey out of the established conventions of fantasy fiction, while also revelling in them? That's what Terry Pratchett 's Discworld novels did, and joyously. He set out to do for fantasy what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns (or, he might have said, what Hitchhikers did for science fiction). AS Byatt called him a genius, and I don't disagree. The Colour of Magic was where it all started – introducing us to the grouchy and semi-incompetent wizard Rincewind and a world balanced on top of four elephants standing on a turtle. Among the book's many virtues are an unimprovable explanation of how insurance works. Buy the book Elric of Melniboné (1972) by Michael Moorcock Moorcock 's pallid, red-eyed, mournful, drug-addicted aristocratic antihero – albino emperor of Melniboné, and victim/beneficiary of the soul-sucking sword Stormbringer – is an immortal icon of the sword'n'sorcery genre. I note below that Tolkien launched a million 1970s concept albums; Moorcock, who toured with Hawkwind, even played on some. Being a fantasy writer has never been so cool. Buy the book The Blazing World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish This novel by an eccentric Duchess of Newcastle is outstandingly strange and inventive. Its lady protagonist is kidnapped by a seafaring cad, but fetches up shipwrecked at the North Pole – where she finds a portal to another universe containing bear-men, bird-men and fox-men who promptly make her their empress. The empress goes on to team up with none other than the Duchess of Newcastle (she needs help cooking up a new religion for her domain, and misses the folks back home), and reality-crossing shenanigans ensue. Think of it as Enlightenment science meets proto-feminist stirrings, meets joyous weirdness. Buy the book China Miéville is one of the greatest living practitioners of what he likes to call 'weird fiction', and Perdido Street Station (first in his Bas-Lag trilogy) was his breakthrough novel. Set in a vividly realised steampunk metropolis, it gives us a flightless bird-man, an insectoid artist who squeezes gunge out of her head, and some super-sinister soul-sucking giant moth creatures that feed on hallucinogenic drugs. And that's just for starters. It's bizarre, thrilling and clever, and has imagination to spare. Buy the book Titus Groan (1946) by Mervyn Peake Did Mervyn Peake invent goths? He can certainly claim some credit. His Gormenghast novels, beginning with Titus Groan, invent a uniquely atmospheric world of crumbling architecture and mopey, enervated aristocrats – through which the Machiavellian antihero Steerpike (think Becky Sharp let loose on the House of Usher) goes like a dandy razorblade. Peake is a strange and baroque writer: darkly funny, too. Buy the book We could scarcely leave this one out. The lavish television adaptation of George RR Martin 's vast world of dynastic rivalries – he set out, he has said, to create a version of the Wars of the Roses – has introduced countless millions to the pleasures of fantasy storytelling. Indeed the television series got ahead of Martin's novels: so the adaptation finished the story before the author finished the source material. But Martin was the one to originally show that the genre trappings of dragons and magic and swordplay don't in any way preclude serious and detailed investigations of psychology and power-politics. Buy the book A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) by Ursula K Le Guin The luminously intelligent Le Guin wrote about a wizarding school long before J K Rowling. This first book in her Earthsea sequence introduces Ged, a trainee wizard – up until then, she complained, wizards in fantasy novels were all generally greybeards – who finds himself chased around the world by a malevolent 'shadow' he has inadvertently brought into being. Le Guin showed how the genre can explore feminism, anti-racism and Jungian psychology while also telling a kick-ass story. Buy the book The Once and Future King (1958) by TH White There is nothing else in the canon quite like TH White's hilarious, heartbreaking, exquisitely written and entirely bonkers riff on Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The first book in the sequence, The Sword in the Stone, stands happily alone as a children's book – describing how its protagonist Wart discovers that he's about to be King Arthur. But the books that follow go on to investigate trauma, kingship, the conflicts of love and duty and the perils of fascism – but also contain a raft of fantastic jokes (some of them excellently smutty) and Monty Python-style spoofs of the tropes of knightly chivalry. Buy the book The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) by JRR Tolkien Fantasy is a genre with ancient roots, but there's no question that Tolkien gave it its modern shape. Pipe-smoking wizards, hairy-footed halflings, gruff dwarves and fiery balrogs: this tweedy Oxford professor gave us them all, and the footprint of his seven-league boots is fixed on every practitioner of the genre since. The Hobbit, avowedly a children's story, came first; but it was on the bigger canvas, and in the more portentous and ambitious register, of the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, that he established modern fantasy as an adult or young adult concern. In the process, he accidentally created Dungeons & Dragons and launched a million 1970s concept albums. Dark riders! Mordor! Sauron! Tolkien's prose could be rickety, but his world-building was and remains unsurpassed. Buy the book Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855) by Robert Browning A genre that encompasses vast epics like David Eddings's The Belgariad and Julian May's aforementioned Saga of the Exiles nevertheless has its essence captured unforgettably in a short Victorian poem. Featuring a chivalric quest, an otherworldly environment suffused by sinister magic, a grand hallucinatory symbolism, a dizzying time-scheme and a historic turning point, it even provided the touchstone for Stephen King's cycle of fantasy novels, The Dark Tower. It came to Browning in a dream, and it has haunted the dreams of fantasy ever since. Beowulf (c975–1025) by Anon Everything, one way and another, descends from Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon tough guy whacks monster, whacks monster's mum, tries the heroics one last time when he's past his best and comes a cropper going toe to toe with a mean old dragon. The narrative pleasures – ultra-violence, competitive machismo and blingy loot – are shaded by a very Anglo-Saxon sense of the poignant inexorability of time passing and heroes going under the earth. If you're worried it sounds old-fashioned, try Maria Dahvana Headley's zippy feminist verse translation to see how fresh it can still be. Buy the book
The Independent
21 hours ago
- The Independent
Woman beaten unconscious at the Rose Bowl for spilling drink on another concert goer
The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Email * SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice A woman from Arizona is recovering after she was beaten unconscious by a man at a concert in Pasadena, California. The woman, who chose to withhold her identity, was attending a Rufus Du Sol concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena with one of her friends on Saturday night. She and her friend drove from Phoenix to Pasadena for the show, and during the concert they spilled some of their drinks on a man sitting in front of them, according to KTLA. 'We apologized immediately, but he yelled that it was intentional and ran off, leaving his companion behind,' the woman told The Festival Owl. 'We apologized to her and thought it was over.' The man reportedly returned approximately a half hour later and began screaming at the woman and her friend and threatened to hurt them. The woman told the outlet she tried to deescalate the situation and apologize, but the man then allegedly punched her in the face. She fell unconscious and woke up some time later in a medical tent. The attack was recorded and went viral online. In the footage of the attack the man launches into a group of people to strike the woman. He throws at least five punches during his attack. A woman in the crowd tries to grab him and pull him away. Complaints that the concert was poorly managed were lobbed at the venue in the aftermath of the assault. open image in gallery The man reportedly threw at least five punches during the attack 'Among the long laundry list of complaints was crowd crushing in tunnels, people pushing in overcrowded stairs, aggressive drunk people, arguments, fans blocking exits, incredibly long shuttle lines, and, sadly, assault,' the LA music blog Grimy Goods said in a post. Another woman — who was seated just a few rows from where the attack occurred — told KTLA that there were people crammed into her section and blocking the walkways. "So, crowd control was nonexistent," Christina Molina told KTLA said. The Independent has requested comment from the Rose Bowl. She also claims she saw other concertgoers openly using drugs, and wondered if intoxication fueled the man's attack on the victim. The woman who was attacked returned to Arizona where she is recovering from the encounter. She has reported the incident to relevant police agencies. According to KTLA, police are searching for her attacker. Anyone who does recognize the man in the video is asked to call the Pasadena Police Department or to anonymously call the LA Regional Crime Stoppers Hotlline. "We are traumatized," the victim said in a post about the attack shared to The Festive Owl. "If anyone knows this man or his companion , PLEASE reach out. He should be held accountable for this assault."
