She lives in north London.Īndrea Levy’s phenomenal success following the publication of Small Island (2004) has led to comparisons with other celebrated contemporary black and British Asian authors such as Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. It includes an essay where she talks about her Caribbean heritage and the motivation this has given her to write.Īndrea Levy has been a judge for the Saga Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2014 her collection Six Stories and an Essay was published by Tinder Press. It was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel is The Long Song (2010), set in early 19th-century Jamaica, telling the story of July, a house slave.

Small Island was adapted for BBC television and broadcast in 2009. It won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year, and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Small Island (2004), set in 1948, explores the interaction between a black couple, Gilbert, a former RAF recruit, who has returned to Britain on the SS Windrush, and his Jamaican wife Hortense, and a white couple: Queenie, their landlady, and her recently demobbed husband, Bernard. In Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Faith Jackson, a young black Londoner, visits Jamaica after suffering a nervous breakdown and discovers a previously unknown personal history.

Her second, Never Far from Nowhere (1996), is set during the 1970s and tells the story of two very different sisters living on a London council estate. Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), is the story of a Jamaican family living in London in the 1960s. She is the author of five novels, each of which explore - from different perspectives - the problems faced by black British-born children of Jamaican emigrants. Andrea Levy was born in London, England in 1956 to Jamaican parents.

The long song by andrea levy