Andrea Levy

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Andrea Levy (born March 7, 1956 in London - † February 14, 2019 ) was a British writer .

biography

Andrea Levy was born in 1956 in London to a Jamaican immigrant couple. Her father and shortly afterwards her mother had come to England in 1948 to start a new life there. For Andrea Levy this meant growing up as a black woman in a predominantly white city. She has this experience a. impressively processed in her novel An English kind of happiness (original title: Small Island ), which received three important awards.

Andrea Levy grew up not far from the Small Island setting. Racism was not mentioned in her parents' home. Andrea had almost exclusively white friends, and she did what all working class kids did: listen to music, watch television, largely ignore books, and study textile design.

In her mid-twenties, Andrea Levy worked for a social institution and had to deal with the defense against racist attacks. During this time she experienced a kind of awakening experience: She, who worked in the costume department of the BBC and founded a graphic design company with her (white) husband Bill Mayblin , discovered her own identity as a woman and as a black woman. At the same time she noticed the power of books. She began to read excessively: while it was not difficult for her to find literature by black authors from the United States, she almost never encountered literature by black authors from the United Kingdom.

When she was in her mid-30s, she began to write what she wanted to know herself. For them literature became a way of self-discovery - of finding the world through world-discovery. Andrea Levy studied creative writing in London and even found an agent, which as a Black British writer in London in the early 1990s was not a given.

In her first three novels, she explored the dreams of black immigrants in London and the problems they face. Her first - semi-autobiographical - novel Every Light in the House Burnin 'was about a Jamaican family in London in the 1970s. Although it initially seemed impossible to accommodate such a novel outside of the "community", as it was semi-officially announced, the novel was published in 1994 anyway. The reluctant pioneer 's second novel, Never Far from Nowhere , takes place in 1970 and tells the story of two very different sisters who grow up in a social housing estate. It was published in 1996 and promptly landed on the longlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction . In Fruit of the Lemon (1999), a young black woman in London experiences a nervous breakdown and learns her own previously unknown story on a trip to visit relatives in Jamaica.

Then came also jamaikanischstämmige Zadie Smith - and broke up with her bestseller White Teeth (German: teeth showing ) finally the spell that on the multiethnic had lain contemporary British literature. For her most successful novel to date, An English Kind of Happiness , Andrea Levy was able to make perfect use of the position of the one sitting between the stools of cultures.

Andrea Levy was a Londoner with heart and soul. London is the central place where all of her novels take place. In addition to her novels, she wrote short stories that were published through various media. Andrea Levy acted as a judge for the award of the Orange Prize for Fiction , the Orange Futures Prize and the Saga Prize .

Awards

bibliography

  • Andrea Levy: Every Light in the House Burnin ' , Hodder & Stoughton; Edition: New Ed (August 8, 1996), ISBN 0-7472-5213-0
  • Andrea Levy: Never Far from Nowhere , Hodder & Stoughton; Edition: New Ed (August 8, 1996), ISBN 0-7472-5213-0
  • Andrea Levy: Never far from nowhere , Salt and Pepper, FfM. (January 2002), ISBN 3-927926-22-1
  • Andrea Levy: Fruit of the Lemon , Review; Edition: New Ed (February 3, 2000), ISBN 0-7472-6114-8
  • Andrea Levy: Small Island , USA, Picador 2005, ISBN 0-7553-3126-5 (original edition)
  • Andrea Levy: The English way of happiness , Eichborn Verlag 2007, ISBN 3-8218-5772-2
  • The long song of a life , Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, Munich 2011 ISBN 978-3-421-04483-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary: Andrea Levy , bbc.com, published and accessed on February 15, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Levy, Andrea
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH February 14, 2019