Matadero Madrid center for contemporary creation

Bernardine Evaristo in conversation with Mar García Puig

Radical Epics
Date
March 23
Timetable

Thursday, 20:30h

Price

3,5€

Category
Venue
Casa del Lector
Auditorio Casa del Lector

Creativity without limits

Bernardine Evaristo is an entirely original author. On the one hand, because in her writing process she uses what she calls “fusion fiction”, a hybrid style that disrupts the reading of traditional prose and pushes it towards free verse, allowing direct and indirect speech to blend into each other and sentences to run on without full stops. On the other, because ever since she started out as a playwright, she has presented to the world a gamut of black lives that explore not only the African diaspora but also the complexities of humanity. For Evaristo, art and literature are creativity set in motion, imagination set free so that others can enjoy it, a form of rebellion. Her narratives raise crucial questions about what it means to be “here”; she creates post-national landscapes in which Great Britain appears as the crossroads of a series of global movements and migrations. At a “dazzling pace, she whisks us off on an intergenerational journey full of stories that span different spaces and heritages: Africa, the Caribbean, Europe", as the 2019 Booker Prize jury noted about her novel Girl, Women, Other (AdN, 2020).

Bernardine Evaristo (London, 1959) is the daughter of an English mother and a Nigerian father. She has written eight books of fiction, essays and poetry, including Blonde Roots (AdN, 2022), Manifesto (AdN, 2022) and Girl, Woman, Other (AdN, 2019), for which she won the 2020 Booker Prize ex aequo with Margaret Atwood. In the 1980s, she co-founded the Theatre of Black Women, the first British company to be made up entirely of racialized women. In 2007, she set up a mentoring programme for poets of colour, and in 2012 she created the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She teaches Creative Writing at Brunel University in London. Her literary reviews and articles have appeared in numerous international newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Vogue or Harper's Bazaar.

Mar García Puig (Barcelona, 1977) holds a degree in English Philology and a master’s degree in Linguistics. An editor by profession, she has published articles in such media as La Vanguardia, El Periódico, El Diario, Público or CTXT. She is the author of the novel The History of Vertebrates (La historia de los vertebrados) (Random House, 2023) and she has collaborated on such books as LGTBI (Sembra Llibres, 2020), The Neo-rancid. On the Perils of Nostalgia (Neorrancios. Sobre los peligros de la nostalgia (Península, 2022) and More than Visible (Más que visibles) (Egales, 2022). She has been a member of the Congress of Deputies since 2015 and is currently the spokesperson for the Culture Committee. She lives in both Madrid and Barcelona.

With the collaboration of AdN and the British Council

Bernardine Evaristo (c) Jennie Scott
In collaboration with
Main Festival Collaborator
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