Small Island author Andrea Levy dies aged 62

Author Andrea Levy has died of cancer at the age of 62.
According to The Guardian, the British writer, who is best known for her 2004 breakthrough novel Small Island, was first diagnosed with the illness six years ago, before it recurred.
Levy was born in 1956 to Jamaican parents who had travelled to England on the Empire Windrush in 1948, as Britain’s Caribbean citizens answered the post-war call from the U.K. government to take up employment.
She began writing in her early 30s and published her first novel in 1994, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin′, which received positive reviews.
However, her fourth novel, Small Island, garnered critical acclaim, and won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It sold more than one million copies around the world and was adapted for the BBC in 2009 in a production which starred David Oyelowo, Naomie Harris, Ashley Walters, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ruth Wilson.
It’s now being turned into a play which will open at Britain’s National Theatre this May.
In 2010, she followed up Small Island with The Long Song, which won the Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Levy explained why she chose to focus on the long-ignored history of British Caribbeans.
“Britain made the Caribbean that my parents came from,” she said. “It provided the people – black and white – who make up my ancestry. In return my ancestors, through their forced labour and their enterprise, contributed greatly to the development of this country. My heritage is Britain’s story too.”
The author, who was profiled on her career and her contribution to literature in Britain by Alan Yentob for his BBC series Imagine in December (18), published her final work, Six Stories and an Essay, in 2014.