ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks are due to Neil Astley, my editor at Bloodaxe Books, for his prodigious commitment to poetry and to this book. To my early reader, the poet Kwame Dawes, who gave important feedback on an earlier incarnation of this book; and to my later reader and husband David, for spending hours going over this manuscript with his blue pen when he could have been watching The Sopranos instead.

About the Author

Bernardine Evaristo was born and raised in London, where she still lives. She is one of eight children born to Nigerian and English parents. Her writing is characterised by experimentation, daring, subversion and challenging the myths of various Afrodiasporic histories and identities. Her work ranges in genre from poetry, verse novel, novel-with-verse, novella, short stories, prose novel, radio and theatre drama, and literary essays and criticism.

Her books include: Mr Loverman (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, 2013), about a 74-year-old Caribbean London man who is closet homosexual; Hello Mum (Penguin, 2010), an epistolary novella about gang culture; Lara, an earlier version of which was published by Angela Royal in 1997, and which Evaristo rewrote and expanded by a third for its new edition (2009) from Bloodaxe Books; Blonde Roots (Penguin, 2008), her first prose novel, featuring an alternate universe in which Africans enslave Europeans; Soul Tourists (Penguin, 2005), a novel-with-verse, which features ghosts of colour from European history including Pushkin, Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady of the Sonnets’ and Alessandro dei Medici; and The Emperor’s Babe (Penguin, 2001), a verse novel about a black girl growing up in Roman London nearly 2000 years ago.