A plaque commemorating the life of critically acclaimed novelist Andrea Levy is set to be unveiled at her former home in Highbury on Saturday to mark the one year anniversary of her death.
The event, held at Twyford House on the Blackstock estate, will feature speakers including Levy’s husband Bill Mayblin, childhood friend Baroness Lola Young, and Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn.
Levy, author of Small Island and The Long Song, wrote extensively on the experience of Caribbean immigrants within the UK. She particularly focused on the Windrush generation, with her parents having arrived in London on the eponymous ship.
Small Island, her breakthrough novel, followed the lives of two couples during the Second World war, one white British and the other Jamaican. It won the Orange prize, the Whitbread prize and the Commonwealth literature prize, and was converted into a play at the National Theatre in May 2019.
Levy was born in Islington in 1956 and grew up on the Blackstock council estate. She attended Highbury Hill Grammar School, now known as Highbury Fields School, and later trained at art school in textile design. She subsequently went on to form a graphic design company with her future husband Bill.
During this time, her interest in writing continued to grow, and she enrolled in classes at City Lit, an adult education college in Holborn. Despite support from her tutors, Levy struggled to get her books about black families in the UK published.
Her first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin’, was published in 1994, and she went on to write a total of five novels before her death in February last year. Levy died at her home in London aged 62, after an eleven year battle with breast cancer.
