Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other sells in 21 deals with TV auction underway

Following Bernardine Evaristo’s historic Booker Prize win translation rights to her novel Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton) have been snapped up in 21 territories with an auction for TV rights also underway.

Evaristo’s agent Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander has revealed that territories are also engaging with the author’s backlist as well. Paterson sold US rights to Peter Blackstock at Grove Atlantic in August 2019 and went on to jointly win the Booker in October, along with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (Chatto & Windus).

A few days after the historic win Waterstones revealed demand was high for the title with PRH ordering a reprint of the Booker-winning novel. It has now sold 21,050 copies in hardback, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Since then Lisa Baker, Anna Watkins and Monica MacSwan at Aitken Alexander have now sold the book in 21 languages on Paterson’s behalf including in Arabic to publisher Masaa, Brazilian Portuguese (Companhia das Letras), Bulgarian  (Egmont), Complex Chinese (Commercial Press), Greek (Dardanos), Romanian (Corint) and Sinhalese (Sarasavsi).

An auction is also currently underway for the TV rights to the novel, and is being handled by Lesley Thorne of Aitken Alexander.

Paterson said: “It has been wonderful to see so many publishers around the world embracing not just Bernardine’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other but her rich backlist, too. We can’t wait to see where the book travels next — and the thought of Bernardine’s Black British women on our screens at some point in the future is a truly thrilling one.”

Simon Prosser, Evaristo's editor and publisher at Hamish Hamilton, said: “This couldn’t be happening to a better book or person. And it makes me very happy to know that hundreds of thousands more readers around the world will be able to read Bernardine’s exceptional work, which is so vital to British writing today.”

Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s eighth book and follows the lives of 12 characters. Mostly black and British women, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years. Evaristo’s body of work explores aspects of the African diaspora: past, present, real, imagined and, as well as novels, spans short fiction, reviews, essays, drama and writing for BBC radio. She is professor of creative writing at Brunel University London and vice chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She was made an MBE in 2009. 

As a literary activist for inclusion she has founded several successful initiatives including Spread the Word writer development agency The Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour (which ran from 2007 to 2017) and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.