Andrea Levy’s legacy for writers

The late Andrea Levy, the award-winning novelist, provides ample inspiration to all aspiring writers. At school she fared badly in English, saying she achieved the lowest possible results in exams. She hardly read any books and started work in the dress department of the Royal Opera house.

Then her design friends persuaded her to read.

“The crucial step to becoming writer herself, rather than just a reader, was a part-time course she embarked on,” writes her husband, Bill Mayblin. “She enrolled in a one-afternoon writing course. She soon found to her surprise that, not only could she write in an honest and direct way that engaged her fellow students, but that she had a story to tell.”

From her thirties, the books were published and two of them, Small Island and The Long Song, have recently been turned into stage productions. Small Island was streamed as a play from the National Theatre during the Covid lock down. And a brilliant production of The Long Song is currently showing at Chichester Festival Theatre until 23 October (highly recommended.)

The daughter of Windrush parents who came to the UK from Jamaica in 1948, Andrea Levy became a measured but powerful voice exploring racism, slavery and Empire through the imagined lives of unheard people. The Long Song, her fifth novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 and won the Walter Scott Prize in 2011.

The inspiration for the book, which won rave reviews, came partly from a visit to Jamaica in the 1990s and took six years to write as she contracted breast cancer soon after the publication of Small Island in 2004.

This visit confirmed her determination to tell heartfelt stories about dreadful deeds in an honest and direct way. They are spiced with the natural humour and pride that she sensed must have played an important part in the brutal lives of slaves who survived against the odds.

“When I was growing up,” she recalled in an article, “my parents were at pains to distance themselves from every aspect of their slave ancestry.” She added that she could tell from their body language and their silences that they came from a multi-cultured society “that was considerably more complicated than I first appreciated”.

In her research she found “few surviving documents or artefacts” which told the story of the slaves. “Writing fiction is a way of putting back the voices which are left out.”

So, in The Long Song she created a rich tapestry of Caribbean, British, Jewish, Chinese, Portuguese and other peoples who lived in Jamaica in the early 19th century, around the time that slavery was outlawed in the UK in 1833.

“These are people who, from their tiny islands, have made a mark on the world,” she writes – and that has been through language, oral stories, music, dance, cuisine, sport, literature and much more.

Andrea Levy died of cancer in February 2019 but her writing lives on, more powerful, more poignant and more relevant than ever. Her books provide reminders that most of us have a tale to tell which may need prompting by friends, fellow writers and editors, or a writing course.