Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy (born 1959) is a British playwright, novelist, and poet. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and she is the author of novels including Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, Billy and Girl, and the Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home.

Levy was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her father was a member of the African National Congress and an academic and historian. The family emigrated to Wembley Park, in 1968. Her parents divorced in 1974.

Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts, leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, including Pax, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and others which are published in Levy: Plays 1 (Methuen).

She was director and writer for Manact Theatre Company, Cardiff.

Deborah wrote and published her first novel Beautiful Mutants, in 1986. Her second novel, Swallowing Geography, was published in 1993 by Jonathan Cape, while her third, Billy and Girl, was published in 1996 by Bloomsbury.

Swimming Home was published in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 among other awards. Levy published a short story collection, Black Vodka in 2013. Her novel Hot Milk was published in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016.

One of Levy's short stories, "Stardust Nation", was adapted as a graphic novel by Andrzej Klimowski, emeritus professor at the Royal College of Art, and published by SelfMadeHero in 2016.

She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989 to 1991.

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