Deborah Levy

01 July 1959

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.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
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...
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
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 et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 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.

de Angelis, April. “Riddle of the Sphinx”. Guardian Unlimited, 10 Sept. 2005.

Hanna, Gillian, editor. Monstrous Regiment. Four Plays and a Collective Celebration. Nick Hern Books, 1991.

“The Amiable Courtship of Miz Venus and Wild Bill - 197”. Sphinx Theatre Company Archive: Productions. 1970s.

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).

de Angelis, April. “Riddle of the Sphinx”. Guardian Unlimited, 10 Sept. 2005.

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.

, 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.