Manifesto
On Never Giving Up
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling and Booker Prize–winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism
Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize win was a historic and revolutionary occasion, with Evaristo being the first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize in its fifty-year history. Girl, Woman, Other was named a favorite book of the year by President Obama and Roxane Gay, was translated into thirty-five languages, and has now reached more than a million readers.
Evaristo’s astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a vibrant and inspirational account of Evaristo’s life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream and fought over several decades to bring her creative work into the world. With her characteristic humor, Evaristo describes her childhood as one of eight siblings, with a Nigerian father and white Catholic mother, tells the story of how she helped set up Britain’s first Black women’s theatre company, remembers the queer relationships of her twenties, and recounts her determination to write books that were absent in the literary world around her. She provides a hugely powerful perspective to contemporary conversations around race, class, feminism, sexuality, and aging. She reminds us of how far we have come, and how far we still have to go. In Manifesto, Evaristo charts her theory of unstoppability, showing creative people how they too can visualize and find success in their work, ignoring the naysayers.
Both unconventional memoir and inspirational text, Manifesto is a unique reminder to us all to persist in doing work we believe in, even when we might feel overlooked or discounted. Evaristo shows us how we too can follow in her footsteps, from first vision, to insistent perseverance, to eventual triumph.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) charts her path from struggling in a working-class family to becoming the first Black British person to win the Booker Prize, in this sprawling memoir. Beckoning readers with a clear-eyed account of her experiences growing up in the 1960s as a mixed-race child to a white British mother and Black Nigerian father in the U.K., she writes, "there was nothing in the British society of my suburban childhood that endorsed the concept of blackness as something positive." In lithe prose, she tackles her complicated relationship with sexuality ("Queerness is a... statement of freedom and enlightenment"), reminisces on hustling her early books (published by "tiny" presses) into readers' hands and finding "a room of my own" in her writing later in life, and dispenses advice on cultivating creativity and intergenerational consciousness. Though her personal narrative movingly speaks to themes of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia and how she overcame them, Evaristo's writing occasionally falls into platitudes, as when she describes how "our books exist as works of art... and once published, they are out there on their own in the world." Still, readers will find much to ruminate over in this meditation on the power of art and persistence.
