In her 2004 novel Small Island, she looks at the experiences of her father’s generation who returned to Britain after being in the RAF during the second world war.

However, the book is more than just the story of Jamaicans looking for a life in the Mother Country. Levy shows how immigration changes everyone’s lives, the conflicts of two cultures thrown together after a terrible war and the kindness and strength people can show each other. 

You can watch Andrea Levy reading extracts from her book below (with kind permission from Whitbread Book Awards, the author and Charles Turley at CTA Ltd).

Small Island by Andrea Levy (Review, £7.99) was the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.

To find out more about Small Island and why it was written, click on the questions below to watch Andrea's answers or read the transcripts below (with kind permission from Whitbread Book Awards, the author and Charles Turley at CTA Ltd).

To read an extract from Small Island about Gilbert, a Jamaican RAF volunteer, sailing for England, click here.

To read about Gilbert seeing his shipmates’ first impressions of England click here.

In a third passage Gilbert watches his wife Hortense’s reaction to seeing London for the first time. To read it, click here.

Transcript

What's Small Island about?

It's about four people - two from Jamaica, two from Britain, who find themselves together in a house in 1948, and it's the story of that meeting. It's the story of that coming together, and its also about what brought those people to that place, who these people were before, that actually brought them to this house in 1948 to have the experiences that they did.

Why did you write the story?

I don't know why I particularly wrote it at this time, but suppose that the germ of it is that I was also going to come to this story I think at some point because my dad was on The Empire Windrush, and there was a feeling that I just wanted to come back and look at that time. Maybe it's because, well, my dad's dead but my mum's getting older now and after a forty years of not saying anything, I managed to actually get her to talk about her life a little bit, and about the life that she lived when she first came to London. So I suppose once I sort of got that stuff I just thought, you know, I want to run with it now, and do it now before she's, you know...

Why is it called Small Island?

Well the title, I was working for a long time trying to find a title. I didn't have a title from the beginning of this book, that's for sure. I'd spent ages just thinking 'Oh what about that, what about this?' and I think I had completed the book and I still didn't have a title that I liked. I was always just looking for something that was in the book, an idea or something that was in the book that I'd kind of missed. I knew there was something there. Then one day it just came and I thought 'Small Island'. Because, in fact, in Jamaica, it's sort of rather a term of disparagement, that all the islands in the Caribbean are small islands, and Jamaica is not. So all small islanders are a bit... you know. Gilbert says it often and talks about small islanders in a rather disparaging way, and I realised that he did all through the book. Then fortuitously I realised that it's also about Britain because it's a book about the end of empire. It's about Britain stopping becoming this great big foot that had painted the globe pink, and it was becoming again this small island, and felt like a small island as well, when during the second world war it probably felt at its smallest then, this beleaguered island that had to defend itself. So it kind of worked, I thought this has a resonance as opposed to the other way around, and that's being really honest about it. I'm being honest.

What did Jamaicans experience when they came to England?

Well, I think Britain had just been though a horrendous war in London through the Blitz, and so it was a pretty dire place. I even remember it from my childhood being pretty grim. Jamaica had not suffered in that way, so coming from somewhere like Jamaica, it was a poor country, but both Hortense and Gilbert are sort-of from the middle classes, and coming from there into this place that was very run down, very grey, well, it wasn't grey, I'm sure the sun shone sometimes, but it felt very grey-in fact really sort of building itself back up. Also the big thing that happened with them is that they changed class immediately. So they came from having a middle class sensibility about what life could offer them, to the limitations of being very poor in a poor country. It was struggling then to build itself back up, and finding yourself as the lowest of the low.

What makes you want to write?

I really write this stuff because I want people to know about it. I don't think I could write for its own sake because sometimes it's not that much fun and it's quite lonely and quite scary because you've only got yourself to rely on and all sorts of things like that. I love it, I really do, but if I didn't have a passion, a real passion for what my subject is, I couldn't do it.