I had spent 10 years being absolutely steeped in the language of the church… It was all very poetic and very heightened.” 4.

I started to write when I was probably 19. It was much, much later – actually, not so long ago – that I realised that shaped my writing. “But I did like the ritual of it… felt very grand… And the language is very rich. “Church was incredibly boring for the most part,” she says. When asked about her earliest influences, Evaristo looks to her Catholic upbringing.

She says that people “used to smash our windows on a regular basis.” While she was aware of the prejudice, Evaristo says it was when she was a teenager that she really “started to engage with the idea of racism”, which she would go on to explore through much of her work. “Racism, as a term, I don’t remember encountering it… when I was very young,” says Evaristo, but she was aware that some people didn’t like her family “because we were brown people”. They used to be the focus of racist vandalism He didn’t want us out on the streets, as a black family in a white area.” 2.

“From the age of five… every week I was getting out as many as I could… There wasn’t a lot to do, even though we were a large family. As the fourth child, she says she rarely got to choose what to watch on the telly (her brothers wanted to watch football) and would frequently go to the library for books. And my mother was a white English woman, who grew up not far from Woolwich, where I grew up.” She is one of eight children. Born in 1959, Evaristo grew up in South-East London.

Things we never got over 2