Andrea Levy

Levy grew up on a council estate in Highbury, north London, the daughter of a father who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948 and a mother who followed soon after; she did not begin writing until an adult-education class in her mid-thirties.

Small Island (2004), her fourth novel, interweaves a Jamaican couple and an English couple who become landlady and lodgers in postwar London, tracing how each arrived at that collision through wartime and colonial flashbacks; it won the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in a single year and sold over a million copies.

She followed it with The Long Song, set on a Jamaican slave plantation, before dying of cancer in London in 2019.