Andrea Levy

AL was a Black British novelist with roots in Jamaica, who began publishing towards the end of the twentieth century. Her five novels (in 2015) centre on the attainment of satisfactory mixed-race and mixed-nationality identities. She presents even the seamiest sides of human behaviour with humour and an understanding of life renewing itself in the most hostile environments as in more favourable ones. Her novels broadened and deepened from their early reliance on her own experience to the creation of characters whose experience is remote from that of herself or her potential readers. She also wrote reviews, short stories, and non-fiction, but her website concentrated almost exclusively on her novels.