Deborah Levy

Standard Name: Levy, Deborah
South-African-born DL began writing experimental fiction, plays, and poetry during the 1980s. She also worked in journalism, performance art and mixed media. By 2021 she had published six novels, three volumes of stories, and three volumes of memoirs. Her work is deeply marked by experience of displacement and exile; many of her English characters come from elsewhere.
Portrait of Deborah Levy. She is against a faint green backdrop and wears a black cardigan and naby top. She has a very fierce gaze.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Doris Lessing
Her effect on her readers has always been both intense and personal. Jenny Diski, who was almost her adopted daughter, expressed a very mixed response to Lessing in person in In Gratitude, 2016. Lara Feigel
Literary responses Ann Quin
Andrew Gallix opened his review with a summary of AQ 's critical reception during her lifetime as one of experimentalism (and her gender) rejected: Reduced to an anomalous footnote in British literary history—a female, working-class...
Textual Production Katherine Mansfield
Scholar Claire Tomalin suspects that this refusal had to do with KM 's unacknowledged debt to Chekhov in The Child-Who-Was-Tired.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Mansfield was, however, feeling discouraged about all her work. In February, with The Garden...

Timeline

About October 1973
The Women's Theatre Group (still in being as the Sphinx Theatre Company ) was founded in London as a feminist and socialist theatre group; its twin organization the Women's Theatre Company proved short-lived.
September-November 2005
An exhibition at the National Theatre in London, Flogging the Jewels, celebrated thirty years of the company now called Sphinx (formerly the Women's Theatre Group).

Texts

Levy, Deborah. “’What’s the point of a risk-free life?’—Deborah Levy on starting again at 50”. theguardian.com.
Levy, Deborah. An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell. Cape, 1990.
Levy, Deborah. Beautiful Mutants. Cape, 1989.
Levy, Deborah. Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography. Two Early Novels. Bloomsbury, 2015.
Levy, Deborah. Billy and Girl. Bloomsbury, 1996.
Levy, Deborah. Black Vodka. And Other Stories, 2013.
Levy, Deborah. Diary of a Steak. Book Works, 1997.
Levy, Deborah. Hot Milk. Hamish Hamilton, 2016.
Elkin, Lauren, and Deborah Levy. “Introduction”. Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography. Two Early Novels, Bloomsbury, 2015, p. vii - xiii.
Levy, Deborah. Ophelia and the Great Idea. Cape, 1989.
Levy, Deborah. “Showcase Women’s Short Fiction Competition: Short Story”. Mslexia, Vol.
74
, pp. 19-20.
Levy, Deborah, and Andrzej Klimowski. Stardust Nation. Self Made Hero, 2016.
Levy, Deborah. Swallowing Geography. Cape, 1993.
Levy, Deborah. Swimming Home. And Other Stories, 2011.
Levy, Deborah. “The B File”. Walks on Water, edited by Deborah Levy, Methuen, 1992, pp. 139-57.
Levy, Deborah. The Cost of Living. Hamish Hamilton, 2018.
Levy, Deborah. The Unloved. Cape, 1994.
Levy, Deborah. Things I Don’t Want to Know. On Writing. Bloomsbury, 2013.