Andrea Levy

7th March 1956– 14th February 2019

Andrea Levy, who has died of cancer at the age of 62, was best known for her fourth novel Small Island (2004). It won the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Prize and was adapted for television in 2009; a stage version will open at the National Theatre in May. It switches between four protagonists in postwar London: a Jamaican couple and their landlord and his wife; and, as Mike Phillips wrote in his review for the

Guardian, it ‘records some of the most unpleasant racist aspects of the period, without displaying any sense of polemical intent, partly because her reliance on historical fact gives Levy a distance which allows her to be both dispassionate and compassionate’.

Levy was born in London, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica. ‘Her father, Winston Levy,’ explained Lyn Innes in the Guardian, ‘travelled to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948, and was joined six months later by his wife… Both parents [who were of mixed race] came to England expecting greater opportunities, but found that their qualifications were rejected.’

Andrea Levy was the youngest of their four children and grew up on a council estate in Highbury where she attended Highbury Hill grammar school and then studied textile design at Middlesex Polytechnic, later working for the costume departments of the BBC and the Royal Opera House. At this time, she also ‘became politically aware and began to read voraciously. Yet while there was plenty of literature by black American writers such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, she found no equivalent in Britain. Taking a writing class at the City Lit college in 1989, she started to write her own story and soon was “hungry, hungry, hungry” to write more,’ according to the Times obituarist.

The Times obituary concluded: ‘For all her novels’ focus on the lives of people whose origins were in the Caribbean, Levy was adamant that her writing was largely about prejudice and shifting identities. “None of my books is about race,” she insisted. “They’re about people and history.”’