11 Facts About Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy was born on 6 August 1959 and is a British novelist, playwright and poet.

Deborah Levy's father, Norman Levy, was a member of the African National Congress and an academic and historian.

Deborah Levy's father was placed under a banning order by the Apartheid government from 1964 until the family fled to London in 1968, initially living in Wembley before moving to Petts Wood.

Deborah Levy was educated at St Saviour's and St Olave's School, Southwark, and then at Hampstead School.

Deborah Levy then trained at Dartington College of Arts, which she was inspired to attend by Derek Jarman, whom she met while working as an usher at Notting Hill's Gate Cinema.

Deborah Levy was director and writer for Man Act Theatre Company, a radical group that operated under the umbrella of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, based at Chapter Arts Centre.

Deborah Levy's major work as a poet is An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, which takes the form of a conversation between an angel and an accountant.

Deborah Levy published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, in 1985.

Deborah Levy has described them as "living" autobiographies, since they are "hopefully not being written at the end, with hindsight, but in the storm of life".

Deborah Levy was a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1989 to 1991.

Deborah Levy was a visiting professor at Falmouth School of Art, Falmouth University, from 2013 to 2015, and from 2018 to 2019 was a fellow of Columbia University's Institute for Ideas and Imagination.