Clean sweep: Andrea Levy defines what it is to be black, British and a literary lioness.

Last year, Andrea Levy saw her luck begin to turn after publishing her fourth novel, Small Island (February 2004) in England, racking up sales of more than 430,000 copies worldwide. Following her previous three critically acclaimed but commercially flat novels, the officials of Levy's British publisher, Headline, were stunned by the speedy word-of-mouth response to the popular book, bolstered by supportive reviews on the Internet, standing-room-only readings and a media blitz. Now Levy is the rage of the English literary world, with her current work garnering several major writing awards. The book was published in April in America by Picador USA.

Small Island, the story of two couples, one Jamaican and one English, confronts black and white "points of contact" with the spheres of race, gender, class and identity during the critical period of the late 1940s and '50s. It was through the immigration experience that she uncovered the core of these characters in this small island of England. "Immigration is a dynamic process" Levy says. "The people who come are as changed by it as the people and land they come to."

Levy, a 48-year-old Londoner, wrote her earlier fiction using her experiences as a child of Jamaican immigrants growing up in the seat of power of the British Empire. But she struck gold following her imaginary chronicle drawing on the actual stories of her parents, a part of the post-war "Windrush" generation, thus termed for the SS Empire Windrush, a decommissioned troop ship that sailed from Jamaica to Britain in 1948, ferrying hundreds of West Indian migrants.

Levy's father was among those on the Windrush, and that generation of black colonials, like her parents, endured the white racism in their quest for a better existence than they had before on the former tropical island home. For these new black immigrants, the life they found there was not unlike the closed society black Americans discovered under the rigid grip of Jim Crow.

"No blacks, No Irish, No Dogs"

"At the time Small Island was set, in 1948, there was no race relations legislation in Britain,' Levy says to BIBR, as she continues on her American book tour from New York City. "It was possible to look someone in the face and tell them you won't give them a job or whatever because they are black. In housing, there were the now infamous signs that were out in the windows to deter black people and other undesirables that read: 'No Blacks, No Irish, No dogs.' That sort of racism is no longer tolerated in Britain. The racism we have now is less overt but in some ways more insidious. Everyone, I think, knows it is still there."

The researching of black Britain was very enticing to Levy, especially with the richness and durability of her own family tree of the post-war generation. Levy's father and his twin brother served among the thousands of West Indians in the wartime Royal Air Force and were among the first to come to the Mother Country after the war. Her mother joined them six months later. Despite the social injustice and prejudice, her parents succeeded on their own terms. Her mother, who was a teacher in Jamaica, took a sewing job and eventually went back to college. She wanted to go back home, but she soon discovered that Levy's father had fallen in love with his adopted country; a love he felt until his death in 1987.

Levy's research for writing Small Island lasted nearly live years. "It was a labor of love;' Levy adds, noting long hours spent in various museums and archives. "I wanted to find areas that hadn't been explored in depth. One of the reasons for that--it needed a lot of research. With my first two novels, 'although they were fictionalized, I did nevertheless write them from my own experience.

"I grew up believing that my family history somehow began when my dad stepped off a ship in England. I realized that my heritage is full and rich. I never learned anything about the history of the Caribbean at school. I was brought up to think that my heritage was worthless in some way because it was not part of the mainstream story of British history."

A Gift for Dialogue

In the current novel, Levy highlights that heritage, celebrating the stories and making them a part of British literary history. Small Island is an artful piece of storytelling, with the writer juggling a quartet of voices to illustrate her narrative. In 1948, Gilbert and Hortense, a pair of Jamaican newlyweds with big-city stardust in their eyes, find their way to a crumbling room in a house owned by Queenie Bligh and her husband, Bernard, who spent the war in India with the air force. Queenie is accepting of the black couple, but her husband is not and makes trouble for them every chance he gets.

Critics have touted Levy's superior gift for dialogue and voices. In interviews about her characters, she has said she could have written an entire book about Bernard, a white racist, which she saw as a challenge in plotting the story.

"It was important to me that all four characters had distinct voices from one another. Getting the voice right was very much integral to understanding the characters. I would sort of hear their voices in my head as I wrote. Each character needed a voice that reflected their lives, upbringings and beliefs. I wrote them in the first person so that the process for me became a little like acting. I would think myself into the character and then see the world totally through their eyes."

Levy's Small Island has captured a mass readership, and judges of the major literary prizes have showered many awards on it: the Orange Prize for Fiction, 2004; the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book Award, 2005; and the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year Award, 2004. When Levy started writing more than a decade ago, she was considered an author with books that were only read by blacks, but that has changed.

"Quality will win out," Kerr MacRae, Headline's deputy managing director told The Jamaican Observer. "It's not scary literary fiction, even though it is literary. It just caught people's imaginations. The first ten people tell the next ten people and away you go."

A Different Kind of Weaving

Born in London in 1956, Levy didn't begin writing until her early thirties in 1988. Following grammar school, she attended Middlesex Polytechnic, where she was a student of textile design and weaving. After college, she started work as a woven-textile designer and assistant buyer in various shops. When she attended a writing course at the City Literary Institute, the literary bug bit her. Soon her schedule included one day off a week to write her first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin' (Headline, September 1994), which was semiautobiographical of a Jamaican family in London in the 1960s.

Her second novel, Never Far From Nowhere (FA Thorpe Publishers), reveals the story of two different sisters, Olive and Vivien, with all the conflicts of family life and racial identity. The book, published in 1996, was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Before her present novel, readers considered Fruit of the Lemon (Abacus Press, May 2002), her most powerful book, with Faith Jackson, who journeys back home to Jamaica to embrace her roots, and Aunt Coral with her treasure trove of family history.

Throughout the process of writing and books, Levy says she never thought of herself as being part of any particular group, although she was an avid reader, especially of African American fiction.

Black American Idols

"I found myself wanting to read the sort of book that I would eventually write, but I couldn't find anything like that" Levy notes. "I had read African American writers, but there was nothing that reflected the experience of black Britons. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde were all very important to me when I first started to read fiction seriously. They made me confident that I had a story to tell. James Baldwin showed me how powerful fiction can be as a tool for change. I often cite his short story "Going to Meet the Man" as a seminal piece for me. It made me realize that "fiction" can be stronger than nonfiction in galvanizing political will."

Publishing in Britain has changed over the past 10 years. First, Zadie Smith's 2000 bestseller, White Teeth, sold more than one million copies and a British TV series, in 2003, Monica Ali's blockbuster novel Brick Lane was nominated for that year's Booker Prize. Even though Levy has the pedigree of a literary pioneer, many critics and readers think of such British-born black and Asian writers as Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Smith and Ali as the real McCoys, the scribes who transformed the notion of English word craftsmanship and culture.

"People often compare us and ask if I mind that they are so popular when I have been writing longer," Levy says. "The truth is, I am just so pleased that two such talented writers like Smith and All are around and so popular. The more, the merrier, as we say in England."

As for the literary awards, she thinks the recognition has been good for her work and career. "The prizes have been wonderful. They have brought my work to a much wider audience. They have liberated me financially and they have laid something to rest in me but don't ask me what."

Like every disciplined writer, Levy has a strict work regime. "I write in the afternoons," she says. "I write in small sections more or less in the order I think they will finally appear. The first draft I write by hand in my local library, where the room is so grim there is nothing else to distract me, so I concentrate on the writing just to get out of there. This first draft is usually babble. Then I type it onto a computer and work on it--over and over and over--until I am happy with that section. I then read it to my partner and move on to the next section."

Her partner is her husband, Bill Mayblin, a graphic designer. She says they've been together for 22 years, but they got married two years ago.

"I have kept my hand in with that and still do little bits of work for our company of which I am still a partner" Levy adds. "Financing my writing has been problematic, but we have managed to work things out."

When Levy is not living in her elegant Edwardian house a few miles outside of London, she is traveling widely, promoting Small Island at bookstores and literary festivals.

On her passion for words, language and writing, she concludes: "I just want to grow as a writer. Everybody asks me what am I working on, what's my next project? I answer: another book. I never talk about what I am working on, in case I talk it out of my system. But I will say it will be a novel like the others, only all the words will be in a different order!"

Robert Fleming, a contributing editor to BIBR, is the author of Havoc After Dark: Tales of Terror (Dafina Books, March 2004).