Andrea Levy is the daughter of one of the pioneers who sailed from Jamaica to England on the Empire Windrush ship. Her father and later her mother came to Britain in 1948 on a quest for a better life. For the British born Levy this meant that she grew up black in a very white England.

She began writing in her mid-thirties and until her new novel The Long Song, her books have reflected the experience of black British born children of Jamaican immigrants. In The Long Song we are on the small island with the story of July, a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation whose tumultuous life ends in blessed freedom.

The publication of Andrea Levy’s fourth book Small Island was greeted with a shower of British Prizes: The Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbred Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.

Since its first appearance in the UK five years ago, her affecting story of Jamaicans who came to Britain in search of a new life has been published in more than 22 countries. A two-part adaptation will be telecast on BBC 1 this fall and likely will be shown around the world.

Praise for Small Island

“Small Island is a great read, delivering the sort of pleasure which has been the stock-in-trade of a long line of English novelists. It’s honest, skilful, thoughtful and important. This is Andrea Levy’s big book.” —The Guardian

“It’s an engrossing read – slyly funny, passionately angry and wholly involving.”—The Daily Mail

“Andrea Levy has written one of those rare fictions that tells you things you didn’t know but feel you should have known.”—The Sunday Herald, Scotland