Andrea Levy was an English author best known for the novels Small Island and The Long Song.
13 Facts About Andrea Levy
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Andrea Levy was born in London to Jamaican parents, and her work explores topics related to British Jamaicans and how they negotiate racial, cultural and national identities.
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Andrea Levy had a Jewish paternal grandfather and a Scots maternal great-grandfather.
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Andrea Levy's family disowned him, so I don't know much about them.
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Andrea Levy grew up on a council estate in Highbury, in north London, and had what she described as "the life of an ordinary London working-class girl".
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Andrea Levy began writing in her mid-30s, after her father died.
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Andrea Levy struggled initially to get her work published, her first novel being rejected by several companies that were unsure of how to market her writing.
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Andrea Levy's second novel, Never Far from Nowhere, is a coming-of-age story about two sisters of Jamaican parentage, Vivian and Olive, growing up in Finsbury Park, London in the 1970s.
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Andrea Levy's fourth novel, Small Island, which looks at the immediate outcomes of World War II and migration on what became known as the Windrush generation, was a critical success.
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Andrea Levy contributed to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, which has enabled an annual scholarship at SOAS University of London.
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In 2023, the British Library reported that it had recovered previously unknown material from Andrea Levy's computer, including a planned TV series on nurse Mary Seacole, an early draft of Small Island, and work on a factual series on the detailed history of the Caribbean for the BBC that never came to fruition.
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In November 2020 it was announced that Andrea Levy would be the first writer of colour whose pen would join the Royal Society of Literature's historic collection, which includes pens belonging to George Eliot and Lord Byron.
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Andrea Levy died on 14 February 2019, aged 62, after living with metastatic breast cancer for 15 years, and her ashes were buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.