Bernadine Evaristo Plans To Spend Women’s Prize Winnings ‘Supporting Other Women Writers’

In celebration of 30 years, the Women’s Prize has created a new, ‘one-off literary honour’ – and named the winner, too. Bernadine Evaristo has scooped up the Outstanding Contribution Award; here’s what you need to know.

Bernadine Evaristo Wins Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award

Novelist and activist Bernadine Evaristo is set to be bestowed with £100,000 thanks to the brand new Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, funded by Bukhman Philanthropies. The Women’s Prize selected Evaristo for her body of work, her transformative impact on literature and her unwavering dedication to uplifting under-represented voices across the cultural landscape’.

At the Women’s Prize Trust’s summer party in London on 12 June, the Girl, Women, Other author will also receive a special sculpture named ‘Thoughtful’ by Caroline Russell MRSS; the winners of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction will also be revealed at this event.

Women’s Prize founder and director Kate Mosse was joined by a selection of former Women’s Prize for Fiction judges to select a winner: Dame Gillian Beer, Scarlett Curtis, Bonnie Greer OBE and Vick Hope. But how did they settle on just one writer?

‘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,’ Mosse says. ‘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 40-year career, made her the ideal recipient of the Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award,’ Mosse says.

Intriguingly, Evaristo has never otherwise won a Women’s Prize; in 2020, Girl, Woman, Other was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, while Blonde Roots was longlisted for the Orange Prize (the Women’s Prize’s original name) in 2009.

Bernardine Evaristo (© Tom Jamieson)

Who Is Bernadine Evaristo?

Bernadine Evaristo is a British author and activist, best known for winning the Booker Prize for her novel Girl, Woman, Other in 2019; she was the first (and remains the only) Black woman to win the prize. But Evaristo’s work stretches long before that big win: her first novel, Lara, was published in 1997, preceded by a collection of poems (Island of Abraham; 1994) and a rich career in the theatre. Her novels published since include The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Blonde Roots (2008) and Mr Loverman (2013).

In the 1980s, Evaristo (along with Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire) founded Theatre of Black Women, Britain’s very first Black women’s theatre company. She has since penned numerous plays, and founded countless schemes to address inequalities in the industry, and inspire young writers to celebrate diversity and challenge the status quo through their creative work. This includes co-founding Spread the Word in 1995 and, most recently, offering her seaside cottage to 10 writers per year as a retreat in collaboration with the Royal Society of Literature, which she was named the President of in 2022.

It’s this multifaceted approach to the arts – to create art, and to nurture others who need support and encouragement to pursue the arts – that secured the Outstanding Contribution Award for Evaristo. ‘Evaristo has consistently used her own magnificent achievements and exceptional talent as a springboard to create opportunities for others,’ Mosse says. ‘To promote unheard and under-heard women’s voices and to ensure that every female writer feels she has a conduit for her talent.’

Evaristo commented that she is ‘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,’ she says. ‘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.’

Evaristo adds that ‘the financial reward comes as an unexpected blessing in my life’. Naturally, with the knowledge of her relentless support of burgeoning writers, Evaristo plans to ‘spend this substantial sum supporting other women writers,’ she says. ‘More details on this will be forthcoming.’

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