Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy was born on 7 March 1956 in London, the youngest of four children of Jamaican parents. Her father, Winston Levy, sailed to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948, and her mother followed a few months later. Both found that their qualifications were not recognised. She grew up on a council estate in Highbury, north London, and described herself as a Londoner, living what she called the life of an ordinary London working-class girl.

She attended Highbury Hill grammar school, studied textile design at Middlesex Polytechnic and worked in the costume departments of the BBC and the Royal Opera House. She did not read a novel until she was 23 and began writing in her mid-30s, after a creative writing course and following the death of her father. Her first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin', came out in 1994.

Her early novels explored what it meant to be both Black and British, and Never Far from Nowhere (1996) was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her fourth novel, Small Island (2004), looked back at the experiences of her father's generation, following four narrators, a Jamaican couple, Gilbert and Hortense, and their English landlady Queenie and her husband Bernard, in postwar London. She said that it was a shared history.

Small Island won the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and later the Orange Prize's Best of the Best, selling more than a million copies and becoming a BBC drama starring Naomie Harris and Ruth Wilson in 2009. Her last novel, The Long Song (2010), set in Jamaica during the end of slavery, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2011.

Levy died of cancer on 14 February 2019, aged 62, a few months before the National Theatre staged its adaptation of Small Island. Her publisher said that she was widely regarded as the first Black British author to achieve both critical and mainstream commercial success. She wrote six books, and in 2014 explained her fascination with the forgotten history of the British Caribbean by saying that Britain had made the Caribbean that her parents came from.