Mr Loverman

Content Warning: This section references racism, anti-gay prejudice, and colonialism, including the history of enslavement.

Bernardine Evaristo is an acclaimed author whose work spans novels, plays, poetry, and nonfiction. With Girl, Woman, Other (2019), she became the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize, 50 years after its inception. Like Mr. Loverman, that novel employs a shifting point of view, focalizing 12 different main characters. Her books address themes of race, gender, sexuality, identity, belonging, and diaspora. In addition to her acclaim in writing, she has also achieved academic success, receiving many esteemed fellowships and working as a professor of creative writing at Brunel University London. She received her doctorate in creative writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, for her work on Mr. Loverman.

In addition to the novel itself, her doctoral dissertation included a critical evaluation of the portrayal of Black men in British fiction and an explanation of how she had executed the novel. The discussion focuses principally on the work of Black authors, as Evaristo is most interested in how they represent themselves. She interrogates how Black authors can write against harmful or oversimplified representations of Black people, and she herself focuses on marginalized voices to place traditionally unheard narratives at the center of her fiction.