Andrea Levy @ EIBF

 

Andrea Levy came across as a very pleasant, very normal person in her event, which was largely concerned with her (Booker longlisted) novel The Long Song. The best part of the event was when she talked about how, when she left school, she might have had ‘shopgirl’ tattooed on her forehead, as that was about the sum of her prospects. So it seemed, because she only seriously started writing in her mid thirties – and touchingly, she gave a lot of credit to her husband for his support in this. In fact she also mentioned that she’d only properly read a novel in her early twenties, although, tantalisingly, she didn’t say which one. Her own novel is about the last days of slavery in Jamaica, but sadly her reading didn’t quite come off. This was more to do with the quality of her prose than anything else – in the passage she read from, the denseness of the writing somehow didn’t translate to speech. Nevertheless, the question and answer session was lively, and Levy’s answers were full and friendly, especially her answers to the questions about research which, she admitted, was hard to do, because there are few slave testimonies surviving to read up on. [Andrea Levy]