Dat's Love

Leonora Brito was born on July 7 1954. Her mother was from Cardiff's docklands and her father was a seaman from the Cape Verde Islands. Brito left school at sixteen, and it wasn't until she was in her twenties that she attended college, taking a foundation art course followed by a degree in Law and History at Cardiff University. In 1991, she won the Rhys Davies Short Story Prize and her début short story collection, Dat's Love, was published in 1995. She was working on a second collection at the time of her death in 2007. Her stories were published in the Library of Wales in 2017 and dramatized by the National Theatre of Wales in 2022.

Bernardine Evaristo, MBE, is the award-winning author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora.

Her novel Girl, Woman, Other made her the first black woman to win the Booker Prize in 2019, as well winning the Fiction Book of the Year Award at the British Book Awards in 2020, where she also won Author of the Year, and the Indie Book Award. She also became the first woman of colour and black British writer to reach No.1 in the UK paperback fiction chart in 2020.

In 2025 she was awarded the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award. Her other awards and honours include an MBE in 2009 and an OBE in 2020. Her writing spans reviews, essays, drama and radio, and she has edited and guest-edited national publications, including The Sunday Time's Style magazine.

Bernardine is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, London, and President of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London with her husband.
www.bevaristo.com