Andrea Levy, Live to Air with Bill Richardson
In 1948 the SS Empire Windrush arrived in Britain with 490 Caribbean men on board - many of them former RAF service personnel. The diaspora represented the first wave of immigration to post-World War Two Britain and it is the story of how one of these men settles in that Andrea Levy imagines in her Orange Prize-winning novel Small Island. In 2004 Andrea Levy, whose own parents immigrated from Jamaica in 1948, sat down with Bill Richardson to read from the novel (showing off a hilarious ear for dialogue) and to discuss the challenges of writing a historical novel about a generation immigrants who found themselves in the midst of post-war recovery.
The book discussed at this event is Andrea Levy's Small Island. You can purchase it from your local independent bookseller or from these online retailers:
Andrea Levy was born in London, England in 1956 to Jamaican parents. She is the author of four novels, each of which explore - from different perspectives - the problems faced by black British-born children of Jamaican emigrants. Her novel Small Island won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year, the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and has been adapted for BBC television. Her most recent novel, The Long Song, was published in April 2010. http://www.andrealevy.co.uk/ (APRIL 2010)
