Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy was a British novelist whose fiction explored the Caribbean immigrant experience in Britain with warmth, humour, and unflinching honesty. Born in London in 1956 to Jamaican parents who had arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948, she grew up in Highbury, north London, and studied textile design at Middlesex Polytechnic before turning to writing in her thirties. Levy's novels include Every Light in the House Burnin', Never Far from Nowhere, Fruit of the Lemon, Small Island (which won the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize), and The Long Song (which won the Walter Scott Prize). Small Island, set in post-war London, became one of the most important British novels of the twenty-first century, illuminating the Windrush generation's experience with compassion, complexity, and devastating wit. Levy died of cancer in 2019 at the age of sixty-two. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers fiction that illuminates a crucial chapter of British history — the story of Caribbean migration to Britain, told with grace, anger, and deep humanity by someone who lived between two cultures.