Literature is not a Luxury with Bernardine Evaristo
8th October 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM BST
‘Literature is not a luxury, but essential to our civilisation’ said Bernardine Evaristo when she was elected President of the Royal Society of Literature. Alongside her career as an award-winning novelist, Bernardine Evaristo is both a teacher and a huge advocate for the importance of arts education. Join her at the Futures Institute where she will be talking to Michael Pedersen, Writer in Residence at The University of Edinburgh, about arts provision in the education system, the importance of creativity in young people, and how creativity positively impacts society as a whole.
Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker Prize 2019 with her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other, the first black woman and black British person to win it. Her novel Mr Loverman (2013) will be broadcast as an eight-part drama on BBC One this autumn, adapted by Nathaniel Price. Her many arts inclusion programmes includes Black Britain:Writing Back for Penguin UK, re-publishing books from the past. She is the current Literature Mentor for the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Initiative. She has received nearly 80 awards, honours and nominations and is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author, and the Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University. His prose debut, Boy Friends, was published by Faber & Faber in 2022 — it was a Sunday Times Critics Choice and shortlisted for Best Non-Fiction at Scotland’s National Book Awards. His third collection, The Cat Prince & Other Poems (Little Brown), won the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Poetry 2023. Pedersen has also been shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. His work has been praised by the likes of Stephen Fry, Sara Pascoe, Nicola Sturgeon, Jackie Kay, Alan Cumming, Kae Tempest & many other fine minds.
