Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy (1956–2019) was a British novelist of Jamaican heritage born in London, the daughter of one of the first Windrush immigrants. Her novels include Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), Never Far from Nowhere (1996), Fruit of the Lemon (1999), and Small Island (2004), which won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread Novel Award, the Orange Prize of Prizes, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. The Long Song (2010), set in Jamaica during the Baptist War of 1831 and the era of emancipation, follows July, a mixed-race house slave on a sugar plantation, narrated with fierce irony and a subversive meta-fictional frame. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2011. Levy's final novel, Six Stories and an Essay (2014), was a collection of shorter works. Levy was one of the most important voices in Black British literature, and her work has been central to the literary recovery of the Windrush experience. She died of cancer in 2019.