Andrea Levy: life and literary works

Andrea Levy (born 1956) is a British novelist.

Born in London to Jamaican immigrants, Levy's work has been characterized by a distinctly racial perspective.

Levy started her writing career in her mid-thirties -- after attending a number of writing workshops -- with "entertaining" novels regarding the black experience in Britain. Levy moved on, in her works, to explore themes such as the England's relationship to the Caribbean, problems faced by black British-born children of Jamaican immigrants (herself being one) and problems faced by British Jamaican immigrants after the Second World War.

Oeuvre

Andrea Levy is the author of five novels. Levy's first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994, Headline Review), is a "semi-autobiographical" piece that concerns the plight of a Jamaican family in London in the 1960s. Her second novel, Never Far From Nowhere (1996, Headline Review) recounts the stories of two "very different" sisters living on a London council estate in the 1970s.

Fruit of the Lemon (1999, Headline Review), Levy's third novel, tells of a young black woman, having just suffered a nervous breakdown, visiting Jamaica and discovering a previously unknown personal history. Her fourth novel is Small Island (2004, Headline Review), which explores issues such as immigration, war, and multi-culturalism. Small Island won the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize Best Book.

Her most recent novel, The Long Song (2010, Headline Review), is a story narrated by a former slave, who recounts her experiences on a sugar plantation named Amity. The Long Song is forthcoming in the United States by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and in Canada by Hamish Hamilton.

Levy has been the recipient of the Arts Council award in 1998, the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004, the Whitbread Novel Award in 2004, and the Orange Prize 'Best of the Best' award in 2005. Her second novel, Never Far From Nowhere was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she has judged numerous literary prizes.

Criticism

Of her most recent novel, The Sunday Telegraph has called it "authentic, resonant, and imaginative." The Guardian, while dubbing the novel "thoroughly captivating," also remarked that, at times, the piece could "seem strange and show a tendency toward the schematic." As in most book-review language, however -- where the majority of terms are abstract -- 'schematic' remained undefined and slightly ambiguous, leaving the reader of the review with, maybe, a concrete -- yet confusing, due to partially conflicting information -- sense of the book being somewhat 'normal' or 'unoriginal' (yet still being "thoroughly captivating"). Of Small Island, Vogue said that Levy "gives us a new urgent take on our past;" and The Age contributing a highly positive blurb that the book is a "triumph of poise, organisation and deep, deep character."

Quotes

"...Wrapped and leather and stamped in gold, will be the volumes whose contents will find you meandering through the puff and twaddle of some white lady's mind. You will see trees aplenty, birds of every hue... That white missus will have you acquainted with all the many tribulations of her life upon a Jamaican sugar plantation... Two pages upon the scarcity of beef. Five more upon the want of a new hat to wear with her splendid pink taffeta dress. No butter but only a wretched alligator pear again! is surely a hardship worth the ten pages it took to describe it. Three chapters is not an excess to lament upon a white woman of discerning mind who finds herself adrift in a society too dull for her. And as for the indolence and stupidity of her slaves (be sure you have a handkerchief to dab away your tears), only need of sleep would stop her taking several more volumes to pronounce upon that most troublesome of subjects."