ANNUAL ROUND UP 2025

Every year when I sit down to write this, I refer to my diary to remind myself how my professional year panned out. The diary only features appointments and therefore represents the surface level of my life and certainly doesn’t give any sense of my preoccupation with the current, quite frankly terrifying geo-political climate that has been the backdrop to this year. So much has been happening that at times it’s been hard to focus on my writing when every day the noise is so loud. I have to remind myself that when those in power are wreaking havoc on the world, my fundamental power lies in my writing. The work must go on, or they’ve won.

This is how is how 2025 panned out excluding my writing projects, which I don’t talk about until it’s publically announced.

The BBC released a digital audio collection of some of my BBC radio writing since   2003. Radio dramas and pieces often disappear quickly so it’s good to have these available again.

The love for the BBC miniseries of Mr Loverman (Autumn 2024) continued with three BAFTA nominations (inc. Sharon D. Clarke) and two wins for the two male leads, Lennie James and Ariyon Bakare. Lennie also won the RTS (Royal Television Society) Best Actor Award. I was so deeply happy for their wins and with the producttion, thanks to the extraordinarily talented and dedicated team behind the scenes and on screen. Adapted by the screenwriter Nathaniel Price for Fable Pictures, he and Jodie Simone-Howe, Head of Costume for the series, were also separately honoured as BAFTA Breakthrough Artists 2025. The series was shortlisted for the Indie Lab Awards and a Sky Arts Award and won the C21 Best Drama Award. Other exciting nominations are in the pipeline, plus the just-announced GLAAD Media Awards 2026 in the US. I will let you know how it all goes on Instagram, which is my primary social media platform, and in the round-up next year. Lenny and Ariyon with their BAFTAS and Fable Pictures producer of Mr Loverman – Faye Ward!

Tour invitations took me to the Ake Arts & Book Festival in Lagos, Nigeria, which is organised by its Founder-Director, the phenomenal writer, publisher, educator and all-round superwoman, Lola Shoneyin. This festival disproves the theory that literary festivals are for older people. The audience was full of very enthusiastic younger readers.

Interviewed by writer Amyn Bawa-Allah for Ake at the British Council in Lagos, nearly twenty years after I appeared there the first time. Same building, different team. Back then they also toured me to Abuja and Kano.

My artist nephew, Charlie Evaristo-Boyce, came with me to Lagos, visiting his grandfather’s homeland for the first time – a very special trip. He’s the nicest person – big-hearted, kind, curious and easygoing. He has an eponymous gallery in Margate, open weekends. Check it out.

Every time I return to Lagos I note how it’s changed so much from the overwhelmingly crazy-beautiful anarchic energy I encountered when I first visited in 1992.

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Femi Kuti, son of Fela, at the Shrine. If you know, you know. 

I also went to the Afrolution Festival in Berlin, founded by the powerhouse academic, organiser and curator, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard – a wonderfully intense gathering of African heritage writers from across the world. Berlin is a city I love and first visited 40 years ago when the wall was still up. You can find a recent post on Substack and Insta about that first visit.

Nadja and her equally powerhouse daughter, Benet

My first visit to Berlin, Xmas 1985. Talking to May Ayim. (RIP). 

At Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, I felt a new and quite emotional connection to Ireland as I told the Irish audience about my Irish forbears. Hosted by Prof Bill Leahy, an ex-colleague at Brunel, he also took me to the site of what had been Birr Barracks where my mother’s grandmother had been born in 1880. She died in Islington in 1941, when my mother was seven. The barracks is no longer there but the wall survives. My sense of the timespan of history is ever-changing and it’s strange to realise that my mother, now 92, knew someone born nearly 150 years ago. My perception of time compresses as I get older as my own lifespan starts to feel very historical in itself!

At the barracks my grandmother left in 1892 when she was 12, before migrating to England.

The invitation to the Hong Kong International Literature Festival brought me to the city for a second time, since a British Council festival in 1998. The handover to China happened in 1997, nearly thirty years ago now. Yet, as a ‘special administrative region’ of China, it still looks and feels quite similar – on the surface. Yes, I know it’s not.

At Brown University in Providence, USA, I did an event for the African Poetry Book Fund, founded by the writer and editor, Prof Kwame Dawes, whom I’ve known thirty years now. (It was horrific to hear of the shooting there last November.) At the lovely Kolkata Literary Meet in India, which is held in a botanical garden, I was shown around the city by a former Brunel student of mine, who lives there. Every time I visit India I feel I need to spend at lot longer there because it’s such a vast and heterogenous country.

I also went to the Venice Architecture Biennale as a guest of the Rolex Mentor and Protege Initiative, marking the end of their brilliantly conceived and executed approximately twenty-year scheme. I’ve written in previous round-ups about my role as their Literature Mentor for two years from 2023-2024, mentoring the Ghanaian writer, Ayesha Harruna Attah. Their architecture pairing for the same period was Pritzker Prize winner, Anne Lacaton, and the young Lebanese-Armenian architect, Arine Aprahamian, who did an in-conversation event. I found it enlightening listening to architects talk to each other, especially about their sense of responsibility to the needs of communities and to the planet.

The Biennale was fascinating and forward thinking, which might seem obvious to people in the field. Most exhibits were so strikingly visual they could have been mistaken for art installations. Sustainability was at the heart of everything.

Space Garden, an autonomous, oribiting greenhouse (Heatherwick Studios)

The standout exhibit for me was a large-scale exhibit called, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 by Kate Crawford and Vladen Joler, which won the Biennale’s Silver Lion Award. It’s described as “a large-scale visual manifesto illustrating how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarisation, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. Spanning twenty-four meters in length, it traces the story of calculation from al-Khwarizmi to deep neural nets and presents a richer historical tapestry to better understand the technological present.”

This genius ‘mind-mapping’ project made sophisticated, complex but accessible connections around technology and society in an absorbing and original way. It might not sound exciting but it was absolutely riveting to see, read and contemplate and I hope it comes to the UK soon so that we can all experience it.

M+ Gallery in Hong Kong – I accidentally came across Old People’s Home (2007) by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, an installation of elderly, male, world leaders in motorised wheelchairs colliding with each other. So salient – but it definitely needs updating, right? (F*ckers.)

Turner Contempoary in Margate currently has two Simone Leigh sculptures in the main lobby area. What can I say? Her artworks are in a league of their own. These totemic expressions of Black womanhood are set against the North Sea that Turner was drawn to paint. If you don’t know, look up the symbolism and relevance of cowrie shells in some ancient African societies. I’ve just seen she’s showing at the Royal Academy in 2027!

Me and Him Indoors also popped into the Turner/Constable comparative exhibition at Tate Britain. We both much prefer Turner.

From my Instagram post/story.

As always, I saw quite a few performances. Highlights included Hamilton, my fourth time – yes, obsessed; Cabaret with the divine Billy Porter; Oedipus at the Old Vic with Rami Malek and Indira Varma (with the Hofesh Schecter Company dance troupe as the chorus); The Fifth Step by David Ireland at Soho Place with Martin Freeman and Jack Lowden; Intimate Apparel at the Donmar by Lynn Nottage starring Samira Wiley; Superwoman Schema by Emma Dennis-Edwards at the Bush starring Golda Rosheuvel and Letitia Wright; The Weir by Conor McPherson at the Harold Pinter Theatre starring Brendan Gleeson, who has an unparallelled presence as an actor of gravitas, depth, pathos and authenticity – both on screen and on the stage. The funniest show I saw was the fabulously camp comedy, Oh Mary!, at the Trafalgar Theatre, which had me crying with laughter.

A special mention of Him Indoors, aka David France, who gave a very funny performance of  Bottom (typecast) in a one-off  performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Marylebone School Theatre, after a month’s tour of Chinese universities with the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival (CSF). They were mobbed, did one show to an audience of 5000, and he was made an honorary professor at a Chinese university. I haven’t heard the end of it!

My darling Bottom

As Aegeon in The Comedy of Errors for the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival. My favourite photo of him – ever. Apparently the kilt is on back to front.

 

The real Him Indoors. We’ve been together 20 years this January. X

While I’m fully aware that I’m prone to hyperbole, the Hofesh Schecter Company‘s production of Theatre of Dreams was incredible – the frenzied energy and weird and wild body movements seemed to me to be reinventing dance. I felt ecstatic watching it – like being on ecstacy at a rave, I can only imagine, as I’ve never been on ecstacy at a rave.

The seven exceptional Kanneh-Mason classical music siblings gave a stirring concert, The Kanneh Masons and Friends, at the Barbican in September. They aged 16-29.

In October I I then interviewed Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason (mother) and Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cellist) about their two new books at the Southbank Centre in October – respectively, Young, Gifted and Black and The Power of Music – both of which should be on reading lists everywhere. They have so much to say about culture, society, family and education from their unique perspective as the first family of classical music; add Kadiatu’s House of Music to the list, which is all about raising her musical family. Exeptional people and exceptional books – don’t take my word for it, find out for yourself.

And I also interviewed Kit de Waal at the Southbank Centre about her profoundly compassionate new novel about kindness and connection,The Best of Everything. She also talks beautifully, wisely and generously about her life and work.

In September I went to an event with the photographer Martin Parr at the V&A with Wendy Jones, a writer friend of mine who wrote his memoir, Utterly Lazy and Inattentive. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read and a gorgeously visual way to record a life – each page has text and a photograph. I strong recommend it. In conversation, Parr was as lovely as people say he was – so sweet, normal, down-to-earth – especially for a man with a huge global reputation. Very sadly, he passed away in December.

The Last Resort, New Brighton, England. One of Parr’s many iconic images. 

The unveiling of the statue of Mary Woolston in the Calthorpe Community Garden at Kings Cross in the heart of London was a spiritual affair, organised by the Black Mary Project, founded by Gaylene Gould. Mary was believed to be a 17th century black female well-keeper in the area and the statue was created by Marcia Bennett Male, the UK’s only classically-trained Black woman stone carver.

L-R: Gaylene, Marcia and two Camden councillors, I think.

Over three years ago Gaylene told me about her ‘Black Mary’ project and lo and behold, it has materialised, alongside community engagement activities. This is how we insert ourselves into the national narrative: someone has an idea and then they make it happen, not taking no for an answer and overcoming all obstacles. Mary is only the fourth public statue of a Black woman in the UK out of hundreds. She is located in very peaceful part of the gardens and is a calming presence. Gaylene: “Public healing spaces, like the well Mary is said to have kept at King’s Cross, are needed now more than ever. These spaces of public healing are crucial sites of community, bringing us together and encouraging connection in an age of increasing disconnection and loneliness.”

Kerry James Marshall’s retrospective, The Histories, at the Royal Academy of Arts, really is sensational: the physical scale of many of the paintings, the scale of his ambition, the scale of his talent, the scale of his perspective and concepts. I stood awed before his paintings as I was transported into a universe that centres Black people in settings that while they are often lushly sumptuous, can also be unsettling. KJM’s art is colourful but never cosy. It celebrates and stimulates, while also challenging and asking difficult questions.

With my friend Noah, we searched for KJM at the packed private view to say hello, but to no avail. KJM painting in background. Just wow.

Creating Line Black Lines 1985-2025 at the ICA, curated by Turner-winning artist, Lubaina Himid, celebrated 40 years since she curated the seminal exhibition of young Black and Asian women artists, The Thin Black Line, also the ICA. My friend Patricia and I were at the original exhibition, as were quite a few of the artists and people at the revisit, so it felt quite historic and cyclical. Most of the same artists were showcased. (RIP: Brenda Agard & Maud Sulter). Click on this link for a video of Lubaina taking you through the history and the exhibition.

Patricia and I – 1985 & 2025

I love the RA’s Summer Exhibition Party which is now in my ‘social calendar’. I do like a swanky do if I’m in the mood, although I am usually among the most under-swanked. I’m always surprised that much of the art for the Summer Exhibition is affordable. I know the concept is relative, but you can buy original art there for under £250.

As a writer I need to engage with the other art forms, not only because I’m a culture vulture but because they nourish my imagination and open up new possibilities for my own writing. It is research. Sometimes I am surprised to detect the unconscious but direct influence of a particular visual artist or art genre on my own writing. Engagement with the arts sustains my own practice which I need to keep recharging.

Other activities:

March: Judged the Nero Gold Award for a second year, this time with Bill Bryson and Emily Maitlis. Our job was to choose a winner from the four category winners. It went to Sophie Elmhirst for her book, Maurice and Marilyn, based on the true story of a British couple in the 1970s who planned to sail to New Zealand but ended up cast adrift on a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for months – and survived. Seriously, you have to read this book.
With Emily Maitlis and Bill Bryson

December: Judged the inaugural Nero New Writing Award in conjunction with my university, Brunel University of London – with fellow panellists, Sophie Elmhirst as the Nero Gold winner earlier in the year, and my Brunel colleague, the writer Helen Cullen. Judged anonymously, the winner was unanimously chosen to be Erwin Joyce Canlubo, a nineteen year old student in his first term at university, with a very original short story about family. There were over 700 entries with no age restrictions, so this was an enormous achievement. You can find his story on their website, alongside the runners-up.

Erwin receives the prize certificate from Sophie – so overwhelmed. He recieves 3K and a free place on the Creative Writing MA at Brunel.
The first symposium on my writing was held at the University of Reading, including an evening event where I was interviewed by its convenor, Dr Nicola Abram. It was so interesting to listen to papers about different aspects of my work. I try not to engage with the critical contextualisation of my own writing for various reasons, although I have always been thankful that people subject my writing to academic interrogation – especially in the decades before the Booker when I had less attention than I do now.

Spread the Word literature development agency celebrated it’s 30th birthday in November at a party in Brixton. I co-founded it with Ruth Borthwick in 1995. I left after four years to see if I could make it as a writer without the support of regular income, and Ruth moved on after five years to take on the role as Head of Literature at the Southbank Centre and thereafter Director of the Arvon Foundation. She is currently Chair of English PEN. It’s good to see how magnificently this charity has supported writers over the years, with different directors and teams (currently Ruth Harrison). Very many of the writers who passed through its doors have gone on to become professional writers. It’s now been renamed the London Writer’s Centre.with Ruth Borthwick – 1995 & 2025

My four year tenure as President of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) came to completion in December. It had been a great honour to hold the post, which I’ve written more about in previous round-ups. I created three prizes for the RSL: the Sky Arts Mentoring Award (for 2 years), the RSL Scriptorium Awards (ongoing) and the RSL Pioneer Prize (10 years). You can find out more on their website. I have always set up schemes, projects and prizes for writers and it felt right to create these three during my presidency. I also wrote four president’s addresses for the annual summer party, which I will probably post on Substack at some point, as they all touch on important issues that concern writers and literature professionals.

I was delighted that globally bestselling and much honoured writer, Elif Shafak, was voted in as the new President. She’s amazing as I’m sure many of you will know. The third woman president in 200 years.

Some prizes unexpectedly came my way, for which I am always deeply appreciative. In June I received the Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, a one-off literary honour marking 30 years of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was created for a living female writer in recognition of her body of work, her significant contribution to literature, and her strong advocacy for women. Eligibility was restricted to authors who had been previously longlisted, shortlisted or won the Women’s Prize for Fiction over the past three decades, and had published a minimum of five books.

Nobody knew this prize even existed or that a panel of judges were making their selections. It was kept under wraps for about a year. Massive thanks, as always, to the Women’s Prize, Bukhman Philanthropies, the judges, and to Claire Shanahan (Director) – and Kate Mosse (Founder), who interviewed me at the Women’s Prize LIVE event in June. A massive shout out to Harper’s Bazaar who held a gorgeous dinner with glorious people in my honour at the Bloomsbury Hotel.

The Prize came with a £100K bounty, with which I founded the RSL Pioneer Prize – to honour a living woman writer over 60 for the next ten years, each receiving 10K. Every year a different panel will make the decision as to the recipient, each year focussing on a different genre. Very often writers who have slid from view are only rediscovered when they die, and then everyone wonders why they’ve never heard of them before. I want this prize to acknowledge, thank and support older women writers while they’re still alive. You know the guys get a much longer run in the limelight, right? The first winner is a pioneer on so many levels – the inimitable Maureen Duffy, born in 1933. Not only is she an author of 60+ books and drama productions for stage and screen, and a humanist and socialist, but she blazed a trail for author rights, LGBTQI+ rights and animal rights as far back as the Sixties. To have achieved all this when she was raised in a single-parent working class home.

August 2025 in Maureen’s home

Other honours were the (Black) Powerlist 100 ‘Woman of the Year Award’, and making the list for a fifth consecutive year; the British Blacklist Honours Award; and I was appointed President Emerita of the Royal Society of Literature.

With Damson Idris & Yvonne Isimeme Ibazebo. Black Excellence Awards 2025

The Powerlist ‘Woman of the Year Award’
I feel very blessed these days, but it has been a forty year journey to reach this point, nor is it all plain sailing. The higher the profile, the more you find some people will try to bring you down. I know it comes with the territory, but this is why the honours I received this year were especially welcome as positive, affirmative gestures.

Sharing some of my good fortune feels good, whether it’s the Kent cottage for the RSL Scriptorium Awards or the Women’s Prize bounty. I will never forget that for a long time I felt as if I was on the outside looking in. I know what it feels like. I’ve been there and I believe that a flourishing arts culture is one where we all support and look after each other. Competition is inevitable, ambition is essential, but community is equally as important.

Not gonna lie – totally flattered to be on the cover of this book, Writers Revealed, 2025, published by the National Portrait Gallery & British Library. The image is from a 2020 photoshoot for when I guest-edited the Sunday Times Style Magazine with a black women takeover, thanks to its then editor, Lorraine Candy and photographer Ruth Ossai.

You can find me on Substack and Instagram.

Wishing you all a great new year ahead full of positive energy, love, hope, community, resilience, resistance and in this climate, courage.

xBernie