Andrea Levy

My paternal grandfather was born Orthodox Jewish, from a very strict family, but after fighting in the First World War he became a Christian and came back and married my grandmother.

"[16][12][14] However, as Margaret Busby noted, Levy "proved that to write about... migration from the specific yet complex perspective of being a black English female is not a limitation to finding a wide and appreciative readership, but in fact the exact opposite.

[17] Her second novel, Never Far from Nowhere (1996), is a coming-of-age story about two sisters of Jamaican parentage, Vivian and Olive, growing up in Finsbury Park, London in the 1970s.

[16] After Never Far from Nowhere, Levy visited Jamaica for the first time and what she learned of her family's past provided material for her next book, Fruit of the Lemon (1999).

[18][1] The novel is set in England and Jamaica during the Thatcher era, highlighting the differences between Jamaican natives and their British descendants.

[19] Levy's fourth novel, Small Island (2004), which looks at the immediate outcomes of World War II and migration on what became known as the Windrush generation, was a critical success.

[10] The Guardian's reviewer, Mike Phillips, praised the writing and the subject matter, calling it Levy's "big book".

[28] Kate Kellaway in The Observer commented: "The Long Song reads with the sort of ebullient effortlessness that can only be won by hard work.

[33] Levy contributed to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby), which has enabled an annual scholarship at SOAS University of London.

[34][35] Bonnie Greer paid tribute to Andrea Levy: "For every great writer, their own story is in their work, and is all that you really need to know.... What she described was a people integral to what the UK is.

"[36] The Bookseller noted in 2019 that, in the UK, Levy had sold "a total of 1.23 million books for £7.9m, with Small Island her bestseller, selling 758,203 copies in paperback and a further 120,749 for the TV tie-in.

[39][40] It was announced in February 2020 that Levy's literary archive had been acquired by the British Library, including notebooks, research material, correspondence, emails and audio recordings.

[1] She died on 14 February 2019, aged 62,[3] after living with metastatic breast cancer for 15 years, and her ashes were buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.