Author’s acclaimed novel explored lives of early Caribbean immigrants to Britain

Andrea Levy, who has died aged 62, placed herself in the front rank of her generation’s novelists with Small Island (2004), which drew on the experiences of her family to provide a rich and nuanced portrayal of the lives of Caribbean immigrants in postwar Britain.

She was inspired to write the book after wondering what might have happened if her Jamaican mother and her white English mother-in-law had met when her parents first arrived in London in 1948. She recorded several hours of interviews with both women to help her create the voices of her leading characters: Hortense, an immigrant and former teacher reduced to occasional work as a seamstress, and her landlady,

Queenie.

Hortense’s husband Gilbert, who has decided to make a new life in London after fighting with the British in World War II, is based on Levy’s father, while Queenie’s bigoted husband Bernard exemplifies the widespread hostility her parents encountered.

By the time Small Island appeared, she had been publishing fiction for a decade, to critical acclaim but little public notice. When, at the start of the millennium, the media began to bestow praise on such young chroniclers of the immigrant experience as Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, Levy’s admirers pointed out she had been doing the same for years.

Small Island had little of the self-conscious literariness of Smith’s White Teeth, which was unsurprising in a work by an author who claimed never to have read a book for pleasure until she was 23. She grew up in a council house in which there was only one room warm enough to stay in for any length of time, and the television was never off. ‘‘I learnt all my storytelling from soaps – Crossroads and Coronation Street in particular,’’ she recalled.

Small Island had a light touch and lack of pretension that helped to make it a popular success, and it eventually sold more than a million copies. Although it was not even longlisted for the Booker Prize, it achieved an unprecedented double by carrying off both the Orange Prize and Whitbread Book of the Year.

It also won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and in 2009 was filmed by the BBC, with Naomie Harris, Ruth Wilson, David Oyelowo and Benedict Cumberbatch. A new stage dramatisation opens in London in May.

Levy’s next novel, The Long Song (2010), was equally acclaimed, winning the Walter Scott Prize and being shortlisted for the Booker. Set on a sugar cane plantation in Jamaica in the 19th century, the novel explored the evils of slavery, but again managed to avoid didacticism and to be more life-affirming than dismaying. Its aim, the author said, was to induce pride in anybody who had slave ancestors. A BBC adaptation starred Lenny Henry.

‘‘I felt like I had no right to take up space in this country . . . learning about my history and about my heritage has made me stand tall.’’

The Long Song proved to be Levy’s final novel. In a BBC profile shown in December, she disclosed that she had been suffering from breast cancer for many years. ‘‘I accept that I am going to die of it,’’ she said, ‘‘but while I am living, I live.’’

Andrea Doreen Levy, the youngest of four children, was born in north London; her father, Winston, had come to Britain with the first wave of West Indian immigrants on the ship Empire Windrush, with her mother Amy, a teacher, following a few months later.

At school, Andrea felt ashamed of her heritage and made friends almost exclusively with white children. Her parents rarely talked about their previous life in Jamaica, being more concerned with assimilating; they both had some white ancestry and were light-skinned, as was Andrea, who for years did her best to ignore the fact that there was anything exotic about her background.

She studied textile design and went on to work as a costume assistant at the BBC and the Royal Opera House. She began to take a belated interest in reading, as well as feminism and racial politics. Around this time she set up a graphic design company with Bill Mayblin, whom she later married.

She fell in love with the works of Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, but could find no books about the experiences of ordinary black women in Britain, so she decided to write one herself. Although several publishers told her that such a book would be unsellable, after two years of rejection her first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin’, was published in 1994.

Levy said that latterly her main aim in writing was to show British readers that the Caribbean was part of Britain, its history part of their own history. Exploring her family’s past also helped her to shake off the feelings of being abnormal that had inhibited her for so long: ‘‘That cowed me for very many years and I felt like I had no right to take up space in this country . . . Actually, learning about my history and about my heritage has made me stand tall.’’

She is survived by her husband and two stepdaughters. –