Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy (1956–2019) was a British novelist, one of the most important voices of Black British writing. Her novel Small Island — the story of Jamaican wartime immigrants in Britain and the white couple who take them in — won the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year, and was adapted into a celebrated television mini-series.

Born in London to Jamaican parents, Levy did not visit the Caribbean until she was an adult, and her fiction returns continually to that inheritance: small island, fruit of the lemon tree, and the long shadows of Empire. Her humour, formal craft and unblinking history-making made her a beloved and award-winning national author.