Andrea Levy: Notes from a small island

When Andrea Levy scooped the £30,000 Orange Prize for Fiction earlier this week with her novel Small Island she declared she was amazed, because she'd never passed her English A-level. "Actually,'' Levy admitted to me, "I got an E in my English A-level which is a pass. But only just."

When Andrea Levy scooped the £30,000 Orange Prize for Fiction earlier this week with her novel Small Island she declared she was amazed, because she'd never passed her English A-level. "Actually,'' Levy admitted to me, "I got an E in my English A-level which is a pass. But only just."

No one would surely begrudge Levy this whiff of exaggeration. Her win is impressive, pitched as she was against top girls Margaret Atwood, Gillian Slovo and Rose Tremain. While Levy was "too busy sitting in the toilets talking about boys", those others are just the sort to be working for a starred A.

Not funky, not Oxbridge and not particularly young (she's 47), Levy doesn't fit the template. The child of parents who sailed from the Caribbean in the first optimistic post-war wave of immigrants, she was brought up on a north London council estate where hers was the only black family. Her ancestors include a red-headed Scot, a Jewish grandfather who married out and a great-great-grandmother born a slave.

But it's not just her exotic background which make Levy an attractive figure for the media. She's also something of a rarity. Try naming another British black (not Asian) mainstream literary woman writer who isn't Zadie Smith. The author of four novels and a handful of short stories, Levy has been hailed as "Britain's most prolific black woman novelist," which really says something about publishing opportunities for black women. (Compare that kind of prolific writing to, say, Anita Brookner's 21 books.)

It was partly the absence of such authors that encouraged Levy to write in the first place. Having devoured works by African-Americans like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, she cast around for equivalents this side of the pond and found little to illuminate her own experience of being born black and British.

In the late Eighties publishers in Britain were hardly welcoming, thinking Levy's fiction would only appeal to a black readership. She recalls how hard it was to get published.

The books by black authors that were selling were about Yardies and guns - and mine was a family saga. I wanted to say: 'I've never sold crack in my life.' We were just a law-abiding family getting on with it."

Indeed, Levy's novels are - as one reviewer suggests - as English as those by Tony Parsons or Nick Hornby. The appeal of her books is that we recognise the characters. They are men and women leading ordinary, rather than extraordinary, lives.

"None of my books is just about race," Levy has said. "They're about people and history."

Small Island took four and a half years to research and write. It tells a cracking story set, mainly, in post-war London. It's touching, sad and often very funny. If occasionally it veers towards romantic fiction in tone, this is more than offset by Levy's wry observation and talent for dialogue. When a shopkeeper with grimy nails brushes his hand through his hair before handling bread, the character Hortense thinks: "Cha, why he know lick the bread first before giving it to me to eat?"

As novelist Mike Phillips notes, Levy has a fine handle on language. There's often a confusion about the nature of Caribbean dialects among British-born authors. They tend to "reproduce the speech of every sort of Caribbean, regardless of region or class." Not Levy.

Strangely, some critics have described Levy as "angry" and Small Island as a savage indictment of race relations. "I don't think she's angry at all," says her friend, the novelist Maggie O'Farrell. "Andrea doesn't have a drum to beat or issues to address, which can make novels leaden." Race is more of an undercurrent - especially so in her three earlier works. O'Farrell continues, "There's something in Fruit of the Lemon when a character gets sacked from a job for walking too slowly. That happened to Andrea. But even the character isn't sure whether it's racist."

Small Island follows a white couple and a black couple, and Levy juggles their four narrative voices. The black couple experience prejudice, but the white couple suffer rejection too.

What makes Levy's writing so appealing is her even-handedness. All her characters can be weak, hopeless, brave, good, bad - whatever their colour. As Kate Mosse, founder of the Orange Prize says: "People think it's only possible to be a black writer and be angry about black/white relations. But colour is invisible in Andrea's books. It's not about being black or white. We all exist in every shade of grey."

At a time when the red-tops continually bash us over the head with the perils of immigration it's germane that Small Island should win a major prize. Addressing race, class, gender and identity, here's a novel about an important moment of British history. Empire is on its way out; multi-culturalism on its way in. There are other post-Windrush narratives such as George Lamming's The Emigrants, Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, Andrew Salkey's Come Home, Malcom Heartland and Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage, but Levy doesn't identify herself as part of a group.

She does certainly explore what it means to be black and British. "I like that point of contact between black and white. The fission," says Levy. "For me, that's where the energy is. Immigration is a dynamic process. The people who come are as changed by it as the people they come to."

She was also keen to examine her parents' own trajectory. Why did they trade one island for another? Why leave family and friends for a cold, unfriendly place still bruised from the war and where the natives didn't want to walk on the same pavement as someone black, let alone employ him?

Levy's father, called Gilbert like the character in the novel, arrived in Tilbury with his twin brother in 1948. He was among thousands of West Indians who had served in the wartime RAF and believed in the Mother Country. He ended up working for the postal service as an accounts clerk. When his wife Hortense arrived six months after him, they set up home in a miserable bedsit in Earl's Court. Although trained as a teacher, Hortense took in sewing to make ends meet. Later they moved to a council estate, Twyford House near Arsenal, where Andrea and her three siblings were brought up.

In Levy's debut, the semi-autobiographical novel Every House in the Light Burnin', she describes, sometimes hilariously, a 1960s childhood. There's only one unpleasant moment when her best friend turns on her with a racist taunt. Levy says: "You know you're different, you feel different and, occasionally, you are slightly wary of people. You weren't always sure of how people were going to take you when you met them. I'm still a bit like that today."

Industrious and well educated, Levy's parents were the kind who never took a day off sick. (Her mother took an Open University degree and worked as a deputy headmistress.) Levy's sister Margaret, who now lives in New Zealand with her widowed mother, has said: "No one slacked in our home. Mum and Dad took education very seriously.

"They would stand over us making sure we did our homework. Dad would say we had to get on in life." For Levy - although she says she was lazy but "good with her hands" - it paid off. She won a place at grammar school. Their mother always told them that the way to overcome problems was to work hard.

What can her mother think about her daughter's using fictionalising her life? "It bothers me that I have to drag my poor mum into my books. It wasn't her fault that I started writing books. I do get extremely nervous and anxious that I do justice to the information given to me. But once you start publishing, you have to take your family into places they don't want to go. I know that my poor mother would like me to shut up sometimes."

What is clear is that despite her family's exotic origins Levy is a very British writer. "I feel that because I grew up black in a working class area I have a panoramic view of things. There's a bit of me that can stand back and see the whole picture. That's what I want to put on the page."

One visit to Jamaica convinced her that she couldn't live there. "It was wonderful to see people who look like you, who remember your mum. But it's not my home by any stretch of the imagination. The mosquitoes make me come out in red weals."

So here she is committed to England. Fifteen years after embarking on her writing course at the City Lit, Levy has won a prize aimed at establishing contemporary classics. Still living in north London but now in rather different surroundings, Levy starts work at two and "shuts down at six," while also managing her husband's business accounts. Her friends describe her as "down to earth" and "one of the nicest people you could meet."

One of Levy's ambitions is to have her portrait hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. If she's successful she'll be in good company. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf didn't have an A-level between them.

A LIFE IN BRIEF

Born: London in 1956. Daughter of Gilbert Levy, who had travelled to Britain on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948. His wife Hortense followed six months later.

Family: Has lived with graphic designer Bill Mayblin for 22 years and married him two years ago. She has no children of her own but two stepdaughters in their 20s.

Education: Highbury Hill Grammar School; Middlesex Polytechnic where she studied textile design and weaving.

Career: Worked in the costume departments of the BBC and the Royal Opera House. Began writing in 1988, attending a writing course at the City Literary Institute. Debut novel was Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994); Never Far From Nowhere (1996) was long-listed for the Orange Prize; Fruit of the Lemon (2000), Small Island (2004) published by Review.

She says...

"Once you start publishing you have to take your family into places they don't want to go. I know that my poor mother would like me to shut up sometimes."

"A lot of writers like being present in their own narrative, but I hate it."

They say...

"I remember feeling frustrated when everyone fell over Zadie Smith. I kept thinking, why hasn't Andrea got the attention? She's being doing this for years." - Novelist Maggie O'Farrell