Levy, Andrea

Just like the protagonists in Small Island, Levy’s father was employed by the Post Office, but her mother, a teacher, was not able to work in England. Levy’s parents were working class and often struggled to get by. Levy recalls times when there simply wasn’t money to put food on the table. She struggled with her identity and her family’s treatment in Britain. She recalls, ‘The racism I encountered was rarely violent, or extreme, but it was insidious and ever present and it had a profound effect on me. I hated myself. I was ashamed of my family, and embarrassed that they came from the Caribbean.’

Levy received a degree in Textile Design at Middlesex Poytechnic but did not enjoy the employment that this degree offered. Following her degree, she worked for both the BBC and the Royal Opera House in their costume departments. Levy did not grow up dreaming of becoming an author. Indeed, she describes herself as not even having read a book until she was 23! It was after enrolling on a short course with City Lit in 1989 that she fell in love with writing. Levy’s first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin’, was published in 1994, with Never Far From Nowhere, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize, published in 1996.

In her early 30s, Levy travelled to Jamaica for the first time. She described the experience as follows: ‘I found all this family I didn’t know I had. My history had started with my father stepping off the Empire Windrush onto English soil in 1948, so finding people there who looked like us and who had pictures of me was quite something. And I felt that I was attached to the place. People were good to me, and claimed me as a Jamaican, they recognised me physically, and I thought, “Yeah, you’re right”. It was a wonderful feeling.’ It was after this visit that Levy published Fruit of the Lemon (1999) and that Small Island (2004), which was hailed as her ‘breakthrough novel’, won the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

In 2005, Levy was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her fifth and final novel, The Long Song, won the 2011 Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. She died on 14th February 2019, having lived with breast cancer for the previous 15 years.

Image credits:
duncan c
Empire Windrush graffiti, Bristol
https://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/40522087955/in/photostream/
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