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[CANCELED] PEN Out Loud: Bernardine Evaristo with Safiya Sinclair

Bernardine Evaristo and Safiya Sinclair

UPDATE: Due to concerns about coronavirus, Bernardine Evaristo’s publisher has canceled her U.S. tour. PEN America and the Strand are therefore unable to present her as planned in this PEN Out Loud event. We understand Bernardine was looking forward to being face to face with American readers, and we share her disappointment.


2019 Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo discusses her award-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other, which spans decades and is comprised of interconnected stories of a group of Black British women of different generations, faiths, classes, politics, and heritages. She will be joined in conversation with 2017 PEN Center USA Literary Award finalist and 2017 PEN Open Book Award longlisted award-winning poet Safiya Sinclair (Cannibal) to discuss the novel, and questions about feminism and race.

Presented in collaboration with Strand Book Store.

Check out our other PEN Out Loud events with:
Saidiya Hartman and Leslie Jamison (Jan. 29) »
Mitchell S. Jackson and Imani Perry (Feb. 12) »
Ken Liu and Andrew Marantz (Mar. 3) »
Emily St. John Mandel and Samantha Hunt (Mar. 25) »


Bernardine Evaristo

Anglo-Nigerian writer Bernardine Evaristo is the celebrated author of eight books, including the Booker Prize winning novel Girl, Woman, Other. Her writing is characterized by experimentation, subversion, and challenging the myths of various Afro-diasporic histories and identities, and her books range in genre from poetry to short story to drama to criticism. She lives in London.

Safiya Sinclair

Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison M. Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. It was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her forthcoming memoir, How to Say Babylon, will be published by Simon & Schuster.

Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in PoetryKenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review,Oxford American, the 2018 Forward Book of Poetry, and elsewhere.  

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