Sara Collins on Andrea Levy: She changed our minds about history
Author Sara Collins reflects on Andrea Levy’s unparalleled ability to write about Jamaica’s colonial history, with her signature dash of levity
Andrea Levy
Andrea Levy was the author of six books, including Small Island, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Whitbread book of the Year
Born in England to Jamaican parents who came to Britain in 1948, Andrea Levy grew up on a council estate in north London before studying textile design at Middlesex University. She did not read a novel until she was 23 years old and came to storytelling via what she had seen on television, rather than what she had read. She wrote novels about what she knew: engaging books that reflect the experiences of Black Britons and the intimacies that bind British history with that of the Caribbean. Her award-winning Small Island was adapted for TV and for the stage. Her novel The Long Song won the Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize. It, too, was adapted for TV. She died in 2019, aged 62.
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The Long Song is set in the time of slavery, and the years immediately after, but it is really a story about a person’s life, a lost voice from history that needed to be heard
— Andrea Levy writing on the inspiration behind The Long Song
The author on her shortlisted novel The Long Song
Watch the trailer for the BBC adaption of The Long Song
All nominated books
Andrea Levy’s bittersweet novel about the last days of slavery in Jamaica is powerful and intimate - and full of mischievous surprise
