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  • An Interview with Andrea Levy
  • Andrea Levy (bio) and Charles Henry Rowell

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Andrea Levy

Bill Mayblin © 2014

[End Page 258]

This interview was conducted on November 13, 2014, at the home of Andrea Levy in the north of London.

ROWELL:

What brought you to writing? Or should I have asked: How did you come to creative writing?

LEVY:

Okay the hard questions first. It was a very practical reason, I just wanted to do an evening class. I used to do a lot of evening classes in all sorts of things, and I thought, “I’ll try writing.” [Laughter] So I went to a writing class, and in the first class the tutor said, “Okay we’re going to write ‘what you know,’ so give me a paragraph on something that happened in your childhood.” I wrote a paragraph, and I think then I realized that I had the most incredible story, and an incredible interest. The two kind of went together, the writing and a burgeoning interest in finding out about my family heritage and about who I was and how we fitted into this society. So the two came together, does that make any sense?

ROWELL:

Yes. [Laughter] So your writing began with the personal?

LEVY:

Absolutely.

ROWELL:

I like that! [Laughter]

LEVY:

I just wanted to do an evening class. I could have done painting or yoga, but I decided to do writing, just to see.

ROWELL:

What were you doing before then? What was your day to day work?

LEVY:

I was a graphic designer. I worked with my husband, and both my husband and I are lifelong learners. We love to educate ourselves. We often do courses or classes, or things like that. So it wasn’t unusual for me to say, “I want to do an evening class, I think I’ll try writing.”

ROWELL:

So you did that one paragraph. And what led you beyond that paragraph? [End Page 259]

LEVY:

[Laughter] Well the tutor said, “Now write what came before then, and then write what came after.” It took me into a sort of thinking that was slightly different, so it started from there.

ROWELL:

And then?

LEVY:

I stayed on the writing course for about six years. It was only two hours a week, so it wasn’t a big time commitment or anything. I just enjoyed it so much, and I learned so much. I had been almost phobic about writing anything down up to that point. I was told at school that I couldn’t spell, that I couldn’t write properly. I’m from the working class, so you don’t have books in the house. Although my mum was a teacher we didn’t have books in the house and we certainly didn’t have ambitions like becoming a writer. That was just cloud cuckoo land. [Laughter] So as I got older I was very nervous about writing anything down, but when I started the class it built my confidence gradually.

ROWELL:

So what sort of thing did you write beyond the paragraph? What were the subjects?

LEVY:

I began to write about my family and how we lived in this country (UK), and what our experiences were. Also, my dad had recently died and I wanted to write about that experience as well. All these things started to come up. It was like a big queue in my head just waiting to come out. [Laughter] I just wanted to examine the life that I had led in this country. At the time I was an avid reader and I would read African American writers, and I thought after a while, “Okay I want to go to the British experience of being a black Briton. What is that experience?” I went to the bookshelves, and there really wasn’t anything there very much. There were a few black British writers like Caryl Phillips and Fred D’Aguiar. Jackie Kay had written something at that point, but very little considering. I thought I was going to be able to immerse myself in the black British experience through fiction, and I couldn...

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