Andrea Levy
| Andrea Levy | |
|---|---|
| Born |
7 March 1956 London, UK |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | British |
| Period | 1994–present |
| Notable works | Small Island (2004) |
Andrea Levy (born 7 March 1956) is an English novelist, born in London to Jamaican parents who sailed to England on the Empire Windrush in 1948. Levy's novels frequently engage topics related to Jamaican diaspora peoples in England and the ways in which they negotiate racial, cultural, and national identities.
Andrea Levy is of primarily Afro-Jamaican descent. She has a Jewish paternal grandfather and a Scots maternal great-grandfather.
Growing up on a council estate in Highbury, London, she attended Highbury Hill Grammar School, "ate a lot of sweets, watched a lot of soap operas and 'lived the life of an ordinary London working-class girl'." In her mid-twenties she worked for a social institution where she encountered racist attacks. She also worked part-time in the costume departments of the BBC and the Royal Opera House while starting a graphic design company with her husband Bill Mayblin. During this time she experienced a form of awakening to her identity concerning both her gender and her race. She also became aware of the power of books and began to read "excessively": it was easy enough to find literature by black writers from the United States, but she could find very little literature from black writers in the United Kingdom.
Levy began writing only in her mid-thirties, having enrolled in Alison Fell's Creative Writing class at the City Lit in 1989, continuing on the course for seven years.
When in 1994 Levy's first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin′, was published, it attracted favourable reviews. The Independent on Sunday stated: "This story of a young girl in the 60s in north London, child of Jamaican migrants, stands comparison with some of the best stories about growing up poor – humorous and moving, unflinching and without sentiment." Levy has spoken of the year of rejections that followed that first novel's publication: "Publishers have a herd mentality. They were worried that I'd be read only by black people.... Apart from African-American writers and Yardie, there was nothing to show I'd sell.... No one had been really successful as a black British writer writing about everyday things."
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