Andrea Levy (born 1956)[1] is a British author, born in London to Jamaican parents who sailed to England on the Empire Windrush in 1948.
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Levy is of primarily Afro-Jamaican descent. Levy has a Jewish paternal grandfather and a Scots maternal great-grandfather.[2]
In her mid-twenties she did work for a social institution that included dealing with racist attacks. She also worked part-time in the BBC costume department, 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.[3]
Levy began writing only in her mid-thirties, but she attracted attention immediately with her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin'. Her fourth novel, Small Island (2004), won three prestigious awards: Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It has since been made into a television drama, which was broadcast by the BBC in December 2009.[4] Her fifth novel, The Long Song won the 2011 Walter Scott Prize and was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
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