Bernard and the Cloth Monkey

Bernard and the Cloth Monkey is the story of navigating adulthood with the weight of a marred and difficult childhood still straining familiar relationships … An important contribution to the literary landscape * Bad Form *
[Bernard and the Cloth Monkey] crosses boundaries in what it’s prepared to talk about, and it does that without melodrama or sensationalism … It’s absolutely beautifully written. I was so drawn to the prose, to the rhythms of the prose – Jacqueline Roy * Five Books *
A quietly outstanding work of fiction … an exemplary novel – Bernardine Evaristo

Judith Bryan is a writer, playwright, and academic. Her first novel, Bernard and the Cloth Monkey, won the 1997 Saga Prize. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in various anthologies, including IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, Gas and Air: Tales of Pregnancy, Birth and Beyond, and Closure: Contemporary Black British Stories. Her play, Keeping Mum, was produced at Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, London, in 2011. Judith is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Hawthornden Fellow. She has taught creative writing at various institutions and community groups and is currently working on her second novel.

Bernardine Evaristo, MBE, is an 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. The novel also won 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. In 2020, she became the first woman of colour and black British writer to reach No. 1 in the UK paperback fiction chart.

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