ABSTRACT
Bernardine Evaristo was born in London to a Nigerian father and an
English mother. She has been critically acclaimed as one of Britain’s most
original and exciting authors. Her first novel-in-verse, Lara (1997),
traces the two ancestral strands of the eponymous Lara, a mixed-race
Nigerian/British woman who grows up in London in the 1960s and
1970s. It travels from nineteenth-century Brazil to colonial Lagos in
Nigeria, from Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century to ‘Little Italy’
in Islington in the 1920s. The narrative unfolds through the multiple
poetic voices of ancestors, friends, family and Lara herself. The
Emperor’s Babe (2001), her second novel-in-verse, was inspired by the
little-known historical fact that black people lived in London in the
third century ad, and began life as a few poems written during
Evaristo’s Poetry Society residency at the Museum of London in 1999. It
is a humorous dig at British history, a poetic excavation and reimagina-
tion of Roman London, working with fact and fiction, myth and con-
temporary culture, tragedy and comedy. The story follows the adventures
of a young girl of Sudanese parentage who grows up in Roman London
eighteen hundred years ago, recreating Roman London through her
eyes.
