Born more than 5,500 miles apart, the Booker prize winner Bernardine Evaristo, 65, and Brazil’s most celebrated living Black author, Conceição Evaristo, 77, share the same surname, though they are – as far as is known – unrelated.

But their surnames’ stories are somewhat connected, and shed light on aspects of the history of Brazil, the country that received the largest number of enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade.

Bernardine’s grandfather Gregorio Bankole Evaristo was born in Brazil and around the year 1900 (the exact date is uncertain) was part of a wave of Africans or their descendants who returned to Africa – in Gregorio’s case, to Nigeria.

Conceição’s grandmother had the surname Pimentel. However, none of her seven children – Conceição’s uncles and aunts – had official documents, a sign of the state neglect that Black Brazilians faced after the abolition of slavery.

The eldest sister, Conceição’s aunt, went to the register office to register herself and her brothers and sisters. Nervous, she forgot her mother’s surname and instead gave the only name she could recall – that of a white neighbour whose first name was Evaristo. And that became the family name.

On Wednesday, the two writers met for the first time in Rio de Janeiro where they were the stars of one of the most eagerly awaited panels at Festa Literária das Periferias, a vibrant non-mainstream book festival where 90% of participants are Black women.

“People have been telling me about Conceição for years because we share the same surname,” Bernardine said. “People would say to me: ‘Oh, do you know about her? Have you read her?’ … So finally we met today, and she’s a total delight.”

Conceição, for her part, first called her British counterpart a “relative from a distant land” but then opted for “cousin”, prompting laughter and applause from an audience of about 1,600 at the Circo Voador, a concert venue turned literary stage in the heart of the bohemian Lapa district.

The panel’s theme was their shared surname. “It was my father’s surname,” said Bernardine. “We thought it was a Nigerian name … When I was about 26, I was asking him questions about his childhood because he really hadn’t told us anything … and he just casually told me: ‘Oh, yes, your grandfather was Brazilian.’”

According to the historian Carlos Fonseca, the author of a book on the subject, about 8,000 formerly enslaved people or their descendants left Brazil for Africa between the 1830s and the early 20th century. Most went to Benin or Nigeria, especially Lagos, Bernardine’s grandfather’s destination.

“When I first came to Brazil in 1992, I was trying to find my family, thinking that somehow I could find the Evaristos,” Bernardine said, recalling a trip to Bahia, Brazil’s Blackest state, where about 80% of the population is of African descent, compared with a national average of 55%. “Of course, that was a silly thing to do and I couldn’t find anything,” she said.

The main issue is that Evaristo, originally Portuguese, is much more common as a first name in Brazil. According to Fonseca, it was typical for returnees to use their first names as family surnames, which were then passed down through generations.

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“But Bahia felt very much like Lagos,” Bernardine said. “You know, there were women wearing some of the traditional Yoruba clothes, they were selling Yoruba food on the street. It was so interesting to see that, over 100 years after people had sailed back, there was still a very strong west African influence in Bahia. And that’s the meaning of the name to me.”

Beyond the surname, the two authors share a commitment to placing Black protagonists at the heart of their stories. “When I write, it is always from the perspective and the reality of my own people, those closest to me,” Conceição said. “I want to place Black people at the centre of the scene based on our experiences.”

The writers are also united in their activism for the inclusion of Black authors. The journalist and writer Yasmin Santos, the author of a new book featuring a biographical essay on Conceição, said this was one of the reasons why Conceição was the “greatest living Black Brazilian author”.

“Not only because of the recognition she receives for her literature, but especially because of her political activism … which continually works to open doors for other Black writers,” Santos said.

At the close of the panel, the festival organisers announced that Conceição – whose books have been translated into English, French, Spanish, German and Arabic – would be the main honouree for the 2025 edition.

“I do not write to lull those in the Big House,” Conceição said, using a term that refers to the homes of slaveowners on plantation estates. “I write to wake them from their unjust dreams.”

You could see Peace’s new book as his third in a series of novels centred on football bosses – the Manageriad? – after The Damned Utd (about Brian Clough) and Red or Dead (Bill Shankly). It unfolds more than three months after the Munich air disaster of 1958, when the plane carrying Matt Busby’s Manchester United home from a European
Cup tie in Belgrade crashed after a stop to refuel, killing 20 of the 44
people on board, with three more dying later in hospital.

Writing in the third person but from the point of view of dozens of those involved – players, journalists, families – Peace dramatises the crash, its aftermath and how United, then reigning champions, managed to complete the remaining third of the season under Busby’s assistant, Jimmy Murphy, miraculously reaching the FA Cup final. It’s a tale of duty, guilt and blame, with the day-to-day commitments on the pitch and boardroom fulfilled amid the burying of the dead and nagging questions about why the plane crashed. A voice inside the head of goalkeeper Harry Gregg, tormented after saving fellow passengers from the wreckage, asks why no one on board spoke up about not taking off in bad weather. “Because like all people,” he replies, “we’re afraid to lose face in front of our friends.”

It’s a stirring proposition but there are doubts about Peace’s handling from the start, with an on-the-nose epigraph from James Joyce’s The Dead introducing a prologue in which the United players, a month before the crash, enter the pitch at Arsenal in white away kit, emerging “out of the tunnel like a ghost train”, a line I winced to read – and that’s before the first line proper, in which Bobby Charlton’s mum is worrying
that “something was wrong, she just didn’t know what”. Her friend agrees: “Can you not sense there’s something in the air … ?”, just as Peace cuts to the wreckage.

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Yet the fault in Munichs isn’t artistic licence – rather, its lack. After The Damned Utd, former Leeds midfielder John Giles sued Peace for his portrayal as “a scheming leprechaun” (Giles’s words), and it’s hard not to feel that Peace has been wary of taking liberties ever since, portraying Shankly from the outside in Red or Dead and doing similar here. One funeral procession after another is described via names of roads on the route; unremarkable action is narrated to imply troubled psychological states, as when we see Murphy in his garden “out in the cold, damp morning, pacing up and down… holding his rosary, its beads and its crucifix in his hand, rubbing at the figure and face of Christ on the Cross as he paced, as he prayed, first asking for forgiveness, then asking for comfort, comfort for others, asking for strength, strength for others, then strength for himself, the strength to help others, the strength to go on, to somehow go on.”

Effective, for sure, but it also feels like a workaround; Peace is in his comfort zone whenever he can give us a good long list, as when Busby, out of hospital, at last gets to watch a match at Old Trafford only to find himself confusing living players with a team sheet of the dead. Individuation matters less than accretion – you feel Peace is seeking the basic drama of how dozens of families suffered the same agony at the same time. Throughout, there’s tension from the title, because Peace doesn’t explain in the novel itself that rival fans still taunt United supporters as “Munichs”; it’s as if he wanted to frame a story about the best of football with the worst of the sport.

His afterword defies anyone to read the novel and still use “Munich” as a slur, which seems to misunderstand his likely audience; he even says United fans (he supports Huddersfield) might reclaim the taunt as a badge of the club’s uniqueness. That suggestion hints at the mood of nostalgia in which this novel was written – capturing an era in which fans awaited results in Saturday evening’s paper or a footballer could be nicknamed after a character on The Archers – yet it’s surely also true that the Munich disaster is the tragic prehistory underpinning the vast and much less obviously heroic commercial enterprise we know today. But my hunch is that this great author would need to be in a less wistful mood – the mood of his novel GB84, perhaps – to want to narrow his eyes at that.

About the authors

“The uniting of grass roots citizen activism with enlightened political actors to impel broad based reform of global institutions grounded in the architecture of the United Nations is timely and imperative. It can happen, as demonstrated in past cooperative initiatives such as the land mine treaty and the International Criminal Court. This book sets out the argument for mounting such a global movement with passion, principle and pragmatism.”

—Lloyd Axworthy, Former Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs

“There is no alternative but to retool the UN system and significantly increase its resources to also enable it to help extricate humanity from the simultaneously unfolding existential crises it faces. Falk and von Sponeck’s vast experience and years of research will feed into the just starting, indispensable process of holding together and modernizing the current multilateral system. This book will prove very useful in the preparatory process for the September 2024 Summit on the Future of the United Nations, focusing ‘on gaps in global governance’.”

—Enrique ter Horst, Former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in El Salvador and Haiti

“This is a book that combines realism in international relationswith idealism. With incisive insights it analyses and dissects the major challenges facing the UN in the 21st century. It is a book that should be read by all those who are concerned about the future of humankind.”

—Chandra Muzaffar, Universiti Sains Malaysia