BERNARDINE Evaeisto's eighth novel, ''Girl, Woman, Other,'' which won the Booker Prize last month, is written in a mix of poetry and prose that she calls ''fusion fiction,'' featuring-

Featuring a dozen interconnected characters who are mostly black British women but varied in age, class, sexuality and gender.

It was an effort, she said, to show through these women. ''We are all things and everything. You cannot dismiss us, nor can you easily define us.''

Evaristo is the first black woman to win the Booker, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards, though this year's prize made news for another reason as well : The judges, unable to choose one winner, gave it to her and Margaret Atwood, for her ''Handmaid's Tale'' sequel, ''The testaments.''

That prompted a backlash among some of Evaristo's fans who felt the split decision undermined her   historic achievement.

She disagrees. ''I don't actually feel that the impact of the prize has been lessened for me,'' she said. ''No single book is the best book in the world anyway.''

Evaristo was born in London in 1959 to a white English mother and a Nigerian father. She initially studied acting but grew frustrated with the dearth of plays by or about black women. ''It made sense to start writing,'' she said.

A few days after the prize was announced, her voice worn down from nonstop interviews, she talked about experimentation and activism in her work, writing complicated older women and why it's not quiet right to say ''Girl, Woman Other" is a book about 12 black British women.

Can you talk to me about why you wrote this book and where the idea came from?

I just had this idea that I would put as many women I could into a single book an somehow connect it through x degrees of separation and see what happened with that.

In a sense, you could almost call it an activist novel.

I don't feel, as a black British woman writer, that I would want to write a book just because I want to explore something about the human race.

My mission is to write about the African diaspora. That's what I have done with all my books. And so focusing on 12 black women was my way addressing our invisibility and also exploring our heterogeneity. There are about 800,000 black British women and we're all different.

How did you approach writing a novel with so many characters while making sure they were fully fleshed out?

It's an experimental novel where each woman has her own space, and that's what's so important. I think the form is very important, because they're not short stories. It is a single novel.

Everybody is interconnected and interrelated. But you go through the sorts consciousness and lives of all  these different women as you read them.

You encounter one, then you encounter their child or their mother their friend, and then you encounter maybe a schoolteacher then her mother and then her work friend.

The honor and serving of this latest book, as the writer puts it 'fusion fiction' continues. The World  Students Society thanks author, Concepcion De Leon.


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