She initially concentrated on writing for the theatre – her plays were staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company – before focusing on prose fiction.
Her more recent fiction has included the Booker-shortlisted novels Swimming Home[1] and Hot Milk, as well as the Booker-longlisted The Man Who Saw Everything, and the short-story collection Black Vodka.
Her father was placed under a banning order by the Apartheid government from 1964 until the family fled to London in 1968,[2] initially living in Wembley before moving to Petts Wood.
[5] She then trained at Dartington College of Arts, which she was inspired to attend by Derek Jarman, whom she met while working as an usher at Notting Hill's Gate Cinema.
[3] After leaving Dartington in 1981, Levy wrote a number of plays, including Pax, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and others (Clam, The B File, Pushing the Prince into Denmark, Macbeth – False Memories, and Honey, Baby), which are published in Levy: Plays 1 (Methuen).
[7] Levy's major work as a poet is An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell (1990), which takes the form of a conversation between an angel and an accountant.
Levy's first volume of autobiography, Things I Don't Want to Know, was written in response to George Orwell's essay "Why I Write" and was published in 2013.
'"[12] Leo Robson, reviewing The Man Who Saw Everything in the New Statesman, provided this overview: "Levy’s project as a writer is itself about effacing borders – between the novel of ideas and the novel of sentiment, between the schematic and the fluent, the inevitable and the accidental, the cerebral and immersive, the sensuous (or somatic) and cerebral, the parochial and otherworldly, metaphor and literalism.
[15] One of Levy's short stories, "Stardust Nation", was adapted as a graphic novel by Andrzej Klimowski, emeritus professor at the Royal College of Art, and published by SelfMadeHero in 2016.