 Hello and welcome. My name is Helen Melody, and I'm one of the curators of contemporary literary archives at the British Library. This is a special event to celebrate the life and work of the writer Andrea Levy. We're delighted to hold this event at the library, especially as we acquired Andrea's archive in 2020. And this week, this Sunday, in fact, the 7th of March would be her birthday. Before we get onto the events, I just have some housekeeping. If you would like to submit any questions for panellists, please do so via the question box on your screen. And a selection will be answered towards the end of the event. You can also use the menu to provide feedback and to donate to the library. Your feedback is important to us as it helps us to continue to plan and run our cultural events program. You can click on the bookshop link for information about Andrea's books and also follow the links to social media to continue the conversation. Please also find information about this event and some short bios on our speakers. This event is part of the Leeds Literary Festival and is being run in association with the Royal Society for Literature. The society has a collection of famous pens from notable writers, including Andrea Levy, alongside Byron and George Eliot and many more. The panel for our event today is very exciting. It's made up of Andrea's friends, family and Rose who've been inspired by her work. It's being chaired by the journalist and broadcaster Gary Young, who is the Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. Before I hand over to Gary to introduce our panel, we're going to begin with a reading by the artist Ella Mesmer from one of Andrea's best-named books, Small Island. Good evening. It's such a joy to be here. My name is Ella Mesmer. I am an artist, a coach, an author and a yogi. And my dance company, Ella Mesmer Company, was very much inspired by reading stories as a child, particularly I loved Andrea Levy and how she would weave the stories, her experiences in the UK and then looking back to her ancestry and the journey of her father and mother and so on. So it's been an absolute joy on this journey. I hope you enjoy this passage from Small Island. It's Chapter 12, a section about Gilbert. On our first day in England, as our train puffed and grunted us through countryside and city, we played a game as colony troops. Look to a hoarding and be the first to tell everyone where in England the product is made. Apart from a little argument over where the Ford made their cars at Oxford or Dagenham, we knew, see me now, a small boy dressed in a uniform of navy blue, a white shirt, a tie, short trousers and long white socks. I am standing up in my classroom, the bright sunlight through the shutters draws lines across the room. My classmates, my teacher, all look to me in waiting. My chest is puffed like a major on parade, chin high, arms low. Hear me now, a loud clear voice that pronounces every P and Q and all the letters in between. I begin to recite the canals of England, the Bridgewater canal, the Manchester to Liverpool canal, the Grand Trunk canal used by the China firms of Stoke-on-Trent. I could have been telling you of the railways, the roadways, the ports or the docks. I might have been exclaiming on the mother of parliaments at Westminster, her two chambers, the commons and the lords. If I was given a date, I could stand even taller to tell you of some of the greatest laws that were debated and passed there. And not just me. Ask any of us West Indian area volunteers, ask any of us colony troops where in Britain a ship's built, where is cotton woven, steel forged, cars made, jam boiled, cups shaped, lace knotted, glass blown, tin mined, whiskey distilled. Ask, then sit back and learn your lesson. Now see this, an English soldier, a Tommy called Tommy Atkins, skin as pale as soap, hair slicked with oil and shinier than his boots. See him sitting in a pub, sipping a glass of warming rum and rolling a cigarette from a tin. Ask Tommy, Tommy, tell me now, where is Jamaica? And hear him reply, well don't know, Africa ain't it. See that woman in a green cotton frock standing by her kitchen table with two children looking up at her with lip licking anticipation. Look how carefully she spoons the rationed sugar into the cups of chocolate drink. Ask her what she knows of Jamaica. What did you say it was called again? Jam what? And hear his lady have a lot living in her big house with her ancestors pictures crowding the walls. See her having a coffee morning with her friends. Ask her to tell you about the people of Jamaica. Does she see that small boy standing tall in a classroom where sunlight draws lines across the room speaking of England, of canals, of parliament and the greatest laws ever passed? Or might she, with some authority from a friend she knew or a book she'd read, tell you of savages, jungles and swinging through trees. It was inconceivable that we, Jamaicans, we, West Indians, we members of the British Empire would not fly to the mother country's defence when there was threat. But tell me, if Jamaica was in trouble, is there any major, any general, any sergeant who would have been able to find that dear island? Give me a map. Let me see if Tommy Atkins or Lady Have A Lot can point to Jamaica. Let us watch them turning the page around, screwing up their eyes to look, turning it over to see if perhaps the region was lost on the back before shrugging in defeat. But give me that map. Blindfold me, spin me round three times and I, dizzy and dazed, would still place my finger squarely on the mother country. Thank you, Ella, for your beautiful reading. My name is Gary Young. I'm Professor of Sociology at Manchester University and a journalist and writer. And I'm here to chair the event this evening and introduce you to August and esteemed panel. I want to start by going to Bill Mablin. Bill and Andrea were very good friends of mine. When I came back from America, it was at their house that I would stay in and we mourn her dearly. Bill is Andrea's former partner and knows her career better than anybody as a writer and actually knew her before her career as a writer started. And he is going to talk about what motivated Andrea to start writing and how that morphed over time into literary fiction. Thanks Gary and good evening everyone. As Gary said, I was married to Andrea and we were together for 35 years. And the first 10 years really of that relationship. Not only was Andrea not a writer, but she had no inkling, no ambition, no idea at all that writing might be a career for her or something that she wanted to do. I never read a book until I was 23 years old. And there was something that Andrea often said in interviews and talks. And there was something that she said, without being the slightest bit embarrassed about it. Because in fact it was the truth. She was a working class girl who grew up in a small council flat with three siblings in North London, and she watched a lot of television. And she went to the cinema whenever she could. But that was the way that she learned her storytelling. That was the way that she absorbed her culture, if you like. And a book's literary fiction was just not something that was part of her cultural landscape at all. The reason that she wanted to make that clear was to remind herself and everybody else that she was not born to be a writer. She didn't have that natural background and she didn't want to pretend that she was anything that she wasn't. So I was, well, she was 25 when I first met her. So that was, there were two years in between her first reading of a book and me meeting her. And in that time she had read quite a lot of books. She had discovered, if you like, fiction, literary fiction. What attracted her to it was the power that she realized that fiction writing could have, not only to entertain and entertainment was always very important to her, but also to educate and to motivate as well. But a fiction book can actually change the way a reader sees the world and thinks about things. This was something that really attracted her very much. But as a reader still, not as any idea that she would ever be a writer herself. Andrea's parents came to this country in 1948 from Jamaica. And they were in the vanguard of what we now talk about as the Windrush generation and in fact her father was actually on the Empire Windrush boat and her mother followed shortly afterwards. They were night-skinned Jamaicans and one of the ways that they kind of coped with the situation that they found themselves in, in this country, which was quite a bit more hostile than they had been led to expect, to try and almost leave behind their sort of Caribbean heritage and just sort of try to fit in as well as they thought that they could in this very white environment that they found themselves in. This was the context of Andrea's childhood, really. She never knew very much about where her parents had come from, wasn't particularly interested, certainly felt no pride in it. But she was acutely aware of her ethnicity and the problems that it could give her and the vulnerability that it gave her. But there wasn't, if you like, a safe space within her family where she felt that she could really talk about this and work out how she could deal with it. Now, the early 80s was, which is when I first met her, was a pretty stressful time as far as the racial politics in this country was concerned. There was a lot of violence as well. All Andrea's friends were white. All her school friends had been white. She lived in a very white area, and all her boyfriends had been white and then I came along, I was white. And for all our heartfelt anti-racism, to be absolutely honest, we were not capable of really understanding her lived experience. Or I don't think we could be as supportive as she needed to be, people to be at that point. And so she turned to books. She looked for the books on the shelves that would speak to her of her experiences as a black person in Britain. And of course, they weren't there, not at that point. There was hardly any at all. And so this is the point at which she began to write. But without any idea still that this could be a career. Simply that she wanted to write in private her own little reminiscences of her growing up and what that meant to her. She joined a group, a course, a part-time writing course at the City Lit, which is well documented. And this was of enormous help for her because suddenly then she had an audience, a small audience of fellow students, who she could gauge the reaction from. And she could see that they enjoyed what she was writing and that it was good. And this gave her a lot of confidence. But nowhere was it ever thought of as a career change. This was just simply a journey of exploration that she was undertaking, almost like therapy really. But it was one story that she was interested in, just one story. And that was her story really. The story of the Caribbean and the British in the Caribbean and that history and its omission and the living, breathing legacy that that has left with us in this country and in the Caribbean. So later she would often say that if there was another way to have explored that story, if she could have made films about it, or been a journalist, or a politician even, then she would never have written at all. But writing was the way into looking at that story. Now this all makes her sound as though she turned into a very political writer, and she was a political writer, but that belies the enormous literary merit and talent that she brought to it, which I'm sure other members of the panel will be able to talk about better than me. But I would just like to share with you my memories of her writing, because she would always read everything that she had written to me. She would never allow me to read things on the page myself, because she wanted to perform them to me. And this is what she did. She would sit me down and read to me with all the accents with all the timing with all the intonations. It was a performance. And this is an interesting sort of a illustration of the way that she worked. It was very cinematic. It was theatrical. Often I would hear her writing in another room, and it would be because I could hear her voice in character. And so those childhood days of watching television and watching films were clearly sort of influencing the way that she wrote literature. So, to finish, I'm biased, obviously. I'm her husband and she was my life partner, and I'm going to like what she did, but I really do think that there is something inspiring and actually very interesting about the career of Andrea Levy. She started as this working class girl whose career's officer at school told her in no uncertain terms that there were good jobs to be had at Marks and Spencers. She didn't take that advice. She went to art college instead and studied textile design, which she then decided she didn't want to do. And so she ended up as a young woman who through both both class and race found herself somewhat on the margins of British society. But despite that, and actually probably because of that, she was able to see that society very clearly and very lucidly, and she wrote a suite of wonderful novels. Novels that were profound and were inclusive and were universal and uplifting and entertaining, of course, but also they were political. They were angry and rightly so. And they were timely. And they were much needed. And on that note, Highland and hand back to Gary. Thank you Bill for in a way that that prequel to Andrea's, Andrea's literary career and the kind of tracing of its origins. I want to move on now to Kwame Dawes. Kwame Dawes a poet, actor, editor, critic, musician, Renaissance man basically and professor of English at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, an editor in chief of Prairie Schooner magazine. Kwame is going to talk to us for a short while about where Andrea stands in the tradition of Caribbean letters and why it's important to place her there. Thanks Gary. You know, one of the fascinating images that I ran across some years ago from the 19th century is an image of a black character with a dancing figure with a ship on his head. It's a striking image. And then an image that has been traced back to West Africa to to the John canoe dances of Jamaica to some of the masquerades from Trinidad and Tobago and in Brazil. And this figure who is moving around with a ship on his head. And I became fascinated by this idea as it related to the, the black experience in in Britain, because in one sense, the, the, the visible presence of of migration is symbolized in the that is sitting on the head. And it almost foregrounds the rationale and the justification they the explanation of why is this person in this place. And so there's a defiant kind of affirmation of this idea of migration. But at the same time, there is the, the, the challenge of, of locating oneself in that space and, and, and in a sense, it seems to me a brilliantly useful metaphor to think about about the, the, the writer, the black writer in Britain. Because I think the black writer in Britain is doing two fundamental things, which is acknowledging the ship on the head, so to speak, but also transforming Britain's understanding of itself. And, and this is not just a theoretical exercise, but it's an exercise of survival is an exercise of affirmation of self and affirmation of one's art and its value in society. I begin with that image, because one of the peculiar downfalls of migration for Caribbean artists and I include musicians, I include writers and painters and so on, happens to have been almost counter into intuitively this question of migration. And, and throughout throughout the culture, there's one sense in which one migrates to better themselves and then to do well and to bring and help the society and affirm the society one is coming from. But in the narrative of popular culture, for instance, when Bob Marley left to go to live in Delaware, we assumed in Jamaica that he was done. It was the end of him and reggae because he left. The idea of whether whether in a post colonial world one embraces the artist who leave versus the artist who stay is a fraught one in Caribbean society and especially in Caribbean literature so we think of people like Austin Clark who moved to Canada. We think of people like Jamaica King Cade, who moved from Antigua to to New York and to the United States. We can think of James Berry who moved to England and who made his career in England. And, and the question was, did these figures are brilliant success and achievement. Did they become part of the understood canon of Caribbean literature and did this thing matter at all. I think what Andrea Levy represents is a writer who came comes into herself by recognizing that her process of writing her task of writing is to tell the narrative of her presence her body in this space in the space and then to ask the question. Am I alien in this space. Do I belong in this space. Do I tell the story of the space to affirm who I am and to affirm what it means to be who I am and and and and at the same time, what do I do with the legacy of my past. I think in story after story novel after novel Andrea Levy. First of all, never located everything in the before wind rush after wind rush but she was very interested in the relationship between the British Britain, the British colonial forces and edifice and the Caribbean as a space created and organized around that vision. And then the movement away from that into something else and independence and so on but she was always interested in that long standing relationship that predated the wind rush and of course had a present moment that was quite quite fascinating and important. I believe though that what has been remarkable about her career is that I think as with Jamaica King Kate. There is a sense in which Andrea Levy affirms and asserts herself as part of the longer tradition, the broader tradition of Caribbean writing, and it's a broader tradition that is even marked by gender by the way in which she enters into the conversation of what Caribbean writing means and what what its value is and how how broad and complex it is by writing work that is committed to understanding the immigrant experience and in particular ways about the Jamaican experience. So I do think that her particularity, which one would assume sort of pre, you know, works against a kind of broader sense of cell a kind of universality it actually does the opposite. I think what we see in Levy is a curiosity about the people who like her, born in England, but carrying with them that ship on their head and having to then explain that ship having to them for themselves primarily, but having to then affirm that what is what is important about that presence of that this body is that it changes the idea of Britishness. So, so, so her Caribbeanness is a rest a journey back into the Caribbean ethos and the Caribbean idea and I think it happens in novels like, like small place and especially the long song where she's, she takes us into those landscapes and owns those landscapes as part of her kind of idea of a kind of mythic understanding of self. And at the same time, she is transforming the British environment by telling the real truth of Britishness that a Britishness is is more protein it's broader it's more complex and must change to reflect the people who are within that space and I think this is one of the great things that she achieves in her work, and she does it by the splendid thing of story that that if anything that has moved me constantly about Levy's work is, is story, the emotional connections that we make with others, the emotional, the emotional connection to ambition, the intersection between a kind of choices the choices that people make and the fatalism of their identity and what their identity means, and the conflicts that are contained in that in that thing in novel after that novel, she manages to find that sweet spot that I think resonates resonates with us in fantastic ways. So, so I was recently watching that small acts series by by Steve McQueen and it struck me that what Andrea has been doing is exactly is being replicated now and I think Steve McQueen would recognize that Andrea Levy is is great precedence to what he's trying to do which is to to to recast the idea of what Englishness is or Britishness is by by giving voice to the intimate details the very intimate details, the everyday details of the people who live in in this space the Caribbean people the black bodies that have come through this space and to me, that's one of the great gifts of Andrea Levy here in her read at Calabash a few years ago, and the way she connected with the audience which was a Jamaican audience, and the sense of belonging that seemed to happen in that moment struck me as one of the great, great memories that I have of her work and just her person and her character so I'll leave it at that I'm sure our discussions will take us into further areas around Andrea Levy. Thank you so much, Professor Dawes for bearing testimony really to the transformational nature of both her person and her work. Next I want to talk to Melanie Abrams Melanie's curator and producer in literature who wants to offer some perspectives about Andrea's writing and respond to a few things in her work at Melanie. It's lovely to be here and thank you to the British Library to the RSL to lead to it first as well for having me. I want to celebrate Andrea on this day her birthday, and I wish to do this as someone who reads and who enjoys books, and particularly enjoyed her books, especially Small Island and the long song as someone who's curious about the particular ways in which certain books catch on as someone who works with writers in the areas of Caribbean and British Caribbean literature and other genres. And as someone who is British Caribbean and who knew Andrea for a number of years, and I knew some of the journeys she was going on to get her books published early on as well. And as someone who like Andrea is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, which as part of a community of writers and professionals were increasingly championing this aspect of diversification of stories, but also challenging the canon, which I think Andrea did remarkably. And I think one of the most notable things is that her books have been adapted. Also, she created audio versions of her books and she read them herself, which I think is truly important because you get to hear Andrea's voice, and you get to get some of her sensibility through hearing those stories by her. But also, I also want to talk as someone who was moved and who was affected by Andrea, not just her work but her words and her orality, and I feel that she should be celebrated for that impact. I first want to touch upon her humour, because I always was noted that Andrea had quite a mischievous sense of humour, and she'd sometimes be quite quiet and then she'd kind of come with a kind of quip or something very quick and it would kind of knock you back with the kind of intelligence of wits. And one example is for a BBC World Book Club, when asked by a reader about her favourite character in Small Island, she mentioned, as the mother of all these characters, I shouldn't have a favourite. But then she spoke about having a soft spot for Gilbert and you could really get that sensibility of her being so enamoured by the character of Gilbert and she said if she had a party of all her characters she'd be sidling up to him. And then she was asked whether she had a favourite, she retorted that she liked Gilbert as well, and Andrea came back quickly with he's mine I'm afraid. I was also struck another time when a reader with the name Jane Austen asked her a question, and instead of responding to the question she just said, Jane Austen, I really love your work. I think I was on in Jamaica on Treasure Beach at Calabash, which is the International Literature Festival that Kwame Dawes and Justine Hensel and Colin Turner set up, and Andrea and Bill were there. And I was sitting from Small Island to a crowd of 1000 or more, and I witnessed the crowd roaring with laughter and there was this sensibility that somehow this kind of showcase of British writing but British Caribbean writing had kind of made this impact on, you know, Andrea beforehand and we were kind of wondering what the kind of impact would be of this kind of Britishness and this kind of book within Jamaica, but there was this sense I guess of the Caribbean and the diaspora joining together in this rumbunctious festival on the beach, and I'll never forget it. And there really was this sense of not just through the various translations of the books and the adaptations but there really was a sense of Andrea having this universality, the way that she wove together everyday stories but also that she brought to bear some of this trauma, not just a slavery through the long song but also looking at aspects of migration, which had been covered before by many authors but there was a sense in which Andrea through warmth and through care brought it to bear in I think a very strident and impactful way. I'd like now to talk about this aspect of Britishness and identity, identities around Britishness which Andrea I felt always challenged through her writing but also through the way that she spoke in interviews. And I remember her saying that if Britishness doesn't define us and she was at that stage talking about being a British Caribbean that we need to redefine Britishness. And she was always very staunch about that aspect that we had to move with the times, and we had to kind of carry on and keep on. And there is this sense today looking in 2021 when we see the impact of Andrea's work but also have many other British Caribbean and the number of years that have been won by Caribbean's and British Caribbean's over the number of years that there's a real sense of punching above our weight and I do think that Andrea has very much contributed to that. There was an aspect of Andrea in terms of her orality and oracy, which I found very impactful. Her heritage is rich with oracy and orality and of nation languages with vernaculars, and I mean Britain as well as the Caribbean. And I'd invite you to take time to listen to Andrea's words, when from 2014 she'd agreed to be interviewed by the oral historian Sarah O'Reilly, because I value spoken word and orality as much as writing and I think Andrea was a very good representation of someone who could mix both. Because if we think of the ways that writing has evolved, which is partly to do with the market and the industry, whereas spoken word and oracy has been given a backseat, maybe because it's there's not so much for a market to be made, but also less of an interest in vernaculars. I do feel that Andrea managed to give an extremely good account, not just herself but of the lives of many others, particularly those unhidden and those unseen stories. And I feel that again it had been done before by a number of other writers but there is this sense of the layering of many stories and of many books over time, which then brings it into the public consciousness. And I was a shy girl and I related to Andrea talking about her shyness and about how she found her voice, not just through her writing but also through having opportunities to speak about her writing. I wanted to kind of talk as well about this aspect of reading, because there has been a lot of reference to Andrea reading her first book when she was 23. But I suppose I would challenge that by saying her work invites very multiple readings but I think part of that multiple reading is the way that she must have obviously been reading her environment from a young age, and she must have been reading closely her surroundings and the wider surroundings and wider milieu around that. I guess what people might call double consciousness. I might suggest that it's maybe triple or quadruple consciousness by this kind of age, but she was certainly reading beyond the films and other aspects of the vision that she had to be able to kind of engage with her family histories and her family stories and that of others to be able to eventually create these magnificent interlocking stories. So I'd suggest that she was an extremely good reader however you might wish to define that. The other aspect I'd like to talk about is how her writing works on multiple levels. There's this aspect of place and making space and the way that she depicted place. There's this aspect of her challenging the knowing your place this aspect of Caribbean is always needing to know their place and about how she defied that through her work. There's this aspect of the everyday stories amongst the brutality and the way that they were blended as part of life. There's this aspect of these jostling intertwined lives that you get within the long song within scenes of absolute brutality and as well as tenderness and realness. And then this aspect of the uncomfortable journeys and the trauma of passage and the terrible statistics, but also the human stories that Andrea was creating. Finally, I'd like to talk about this aspect of Andrea being a writer and using that as a form of creative power which can have a healing effect, because we carry the fractures of our family and our ancestors with us. And we might continually ask questions that challenge aspects of our identity, but I suggest that Andrea's writing was a form of creative power, but it was also a healing power, not just for her, but for many others. And I reminded the Maya Angelou quote that there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. And I'd like to celebrate Andrea, and maybe also pose to the British Caribbean's who are in this space, of which I know there are a number of friends and say that whilst we remember and celebrate Andrea. Let's think about what the impact of Andrea's work might have for us and for our communities and for ourselves as we go forward. Thank you. Thank you Melanie. I in fact sidled up to the first time I met Andrea I sidled up to her at a guardian drinks party and and I said you know I've read all your books. I'm a big fan. And, and she said, What do you want. I don't want anything I'm just just chatting and then I got her number and I said, you know, maybe we can have lunch sometime so I'm not going to tell you anything. I said, Okay, and I don't want to interview for a story I just thought it might be nice to have lunch. And she was deeply suspicious at that stage fruit of the lemon had not yet come out of why anyone would be. She was deeply suspicious, basically she was deeply suspicious of my of my motives not even remotely in a romantic nature just just kind of like just stay away just back off. I, you know, I don't get it. Amazing that we managed to become good friends with such a rocky start. Now I want to move on to thank you so much Melanie to Michael perfect senior lecturer in English literature at Liverpool, John Moore's University, who wants to discuss Andrews archive some of her unpublished projects and the general impact of Michael. Thanks Gary, and thanks to the organizers of this fantastic event for inviting me. It really is a privilege to be here talking about one of the most accomplished and significant writers of our times. I've been thinking about writing about and teaching Andrea's fiction for over a decade now. I teach her work on a couple of modules at my current university, Liverpool John Moore's, but I've also taught Andrea's work at a university in Turkey at a sixth form in a deprived area of South London at University of Cambridge and English language schools as well. And I've lost count of the many, many students from all kinds of backgrounds who I've seen be inspired challenged educated and moved by her fiction. And since the first drew me to Andrea's work was its vitality. Her characters always feel alive and fully human. She had an astonishing gift for voices. But her works always felt vital in the sense of importance to its determined to tackle the biggest thorniest most pressing issues of the day. And since her death her work has come to seem even more urgent than ever. I remember watching the stage adaptation of Small Island two years ago, while the grim revelations of the Windrush scandal was still emerging. Her story of Caribbean migrants to Britain in 1948 had never felt so crucial to our cultural conversation. But it's not just the Windrush scandal. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the toppling of statues of slave traders, the growth of the far right, the disproportionate toll that COVID-19 is having on ethnic minorities because of systemic racism, is going struggle to decolonize curricula. Now more than ever, I think, the stories and the voices of Andrea's work demand to be heard. I've been working on a book length study of Andrea's fiction for a while, and Manchester University Press have been very patient with me during this process, but there's a good reason that it's taken so long. A few years ago I noticed that the British Library was displaying some material from Andrea's archive as part of an exhibition celebrating 70 years since Windrush. I got in touch with the British Library explaining about the book I was writing and asked if they might have other material that I could see. They forwarded my message on. To my surprise, I got a response from Bill, Andrea's husband, who you've heard from tonight. To be honest, I was pretty shocked when Bill told me that he and Andrea knew of my existing work on her novels and delighted when he said that Andrea was pleased to hear about the forthcoming book and keen to help if possible. Unfortunately, at that stage her deteriorating health meant that I never did get the chance to discuss Andrea's work with her. After her death, Bill asked me if I'd be interested in seeing her archive, and the answer of course was yes. I made an initial one day trip to see the archive at their home, and frankly I was just blown away. It's an extraordinary body of literary material, decades of work by an artist absolutely dedicated to her craft. It contains, for example, documents relating to the extensive research that Andrea did. In relation just to the long song, it contains annotated books and articles on the history of the Caribbean, extensive notes on the experiences of slaves, printouts of an anti-folk stories, a list of questions to ask people who spent time in the Caribbean before independence, and printouts of various historical documents. One of those historical documents is a list of real manumitted Jamaican slaves dated 1825, on which Andrea had highlighted, among others, the names July, Kitty and Godfrey, the names of central characters in the long song. A novel about the human beings who lived under slavery was, it's clear, exhaustively researched. Her research for Small Island was extensive as well. Her archive contains questionnaires that she sent to RAF veterans who'd served in Burma. But the archive also offers new insights into her methods and her skills as a writer, her remarkable literary craft. It contains early notes to work towards her novels and other published works. A great many drafts of those works, both handwritten and typed, draft speeches and essays, documents relating to adaptations of her novels, various kinds of correspondence, and work towards some projects that didn't come to light during her lifetime. I'll say more about some of those in a moment. After my initial trip, I was privileged to be able to make a number of longer visits to Bill's home to continue my work on the archive. Last year, as you've heard, it was acquired by the British Library, and my research on it is ongoing. So the archive offers new insights into each of Andrea's five novels, the ways in which she developed ideas, the emergence of distinctive narrative voices, the mapping and planning of plotlines and themes, but also links between the novels. One document confirms that July from the long song is the great grandmother of Gilbert from Small Island. We've got just a few images to show you of some material relating to Small Island. So firstly, a handwritten draft of an early passage in the novel in which Hortense arrives at the house on Neven Street and rings the doorbell. In doing so, Hortense is fulfilling her dreams, but her nightmare is about to begin. And it starts, Hortense paused before her finger pressed the doorbell. So you can see straight away that unlike the final version of the novel, this draft piece is written in the third person. On the left-hand page, you can see Andrea's notes to herself. This is really common in her archive, draft work on the right-hand side of a notebook and her thoughts on it in the left. Her notes to herself are sometimes encouraging and sometimes, frankly, brutal. And in this second image, some of you may recognise this passage from the novel. Again, this is written in the third person here rather than the first. Queenie's psychology is being very, very carefully developed in this passage, but everything really clicks, I think, when the voices start to emerge. And in the final image, two really interesting documents. On the left, a little map that Andrea sketched of Hortense and Gilbert's room in the house. And on the right, a chart that shows her thinking through and developing the distinctive vocabulary of each narrator. As you can see, Bernard says things like, silly, I know. Queenie says things like blinking heck. Gilbert says things like, and hear this. And Hortense says things like, someone such as I. This provides a wonderful insight, I think, into the development of those vital voices. As I mentioned, the archive also contains work that didn't come to light during Andrea's lifetime. Separately to my book, I've recently written an article about these unpublished projects, many of which were very politically engaged. In her final years, Andrea came to be particularly invested in a project that was a documentary mini series on the historical relationship between Britain and the Caribbean. In collaboration with others, she developed and pitched this series ultimately unsuccessfully to the BBC. But when she pitched it, she was told, sorry, she initially imagined getting the project going and then taking a backseat role. But when she pitched it, she was told that she should write it and she should present it and make it much more personal to her. She had serious reservations about this. And as she wrote in her journal, she was, quote, nervous that it was getting to be too personal a journey. The production company, however, was, quote, adamant that personal is good and what the BBC wanted. He seemed to get the series made, she reluctantly agreed. But when her new more personal version of the series was submitted, it was passed to a senior figure at the BBC who rejected it for one reason. As Andrea wrote in her journal, quote, it was too personal. So the series was rejected for being the very thing that Andrea had been pushed to make it. Her journal entries also make it clear that lack of diversity at the BBC significantly impeded this project. It is frankly an enormous shame that it never got made. She also wrote a screenplay based on the autobiography of Mary Seacole. In 2003, Seacole was voted the greatest ever Black Britain, and yet her story is still unknown to many. Like its subject and like all of Andrea's work, I think this screenplay is full of drama and humor and wit. It retells Seacole's story, but it also definitely explores the ways in which that story came to be overshadowed by that Florence Nightingale. Andrea's script manages to bring Seacole to life in all her vivacity, but it also shows how Nightingale's famous lamp has confined Seacole to the shadows of British history. A final and published work I'd like to mention is the short piece too, a handwritten dialogue that Bill found in the archive after Andrea's death. As Gary has written in a piece for the new statesman, and as I discussed in my article, two is a profoundly moving reflection on Andrea's terminal illness and mortality. Some of you may have heard it performed in a Radio 4 broadcast last year. I'm pleased to say that with Bill's permission, two is being published along with extracts from the Seacole screenplay as part of a special immemorial issue of the academic journal Aerial, which I'm pleased to be co-editing. Bill and I consulted on very minor edits to two and a Seacole extracts. We really didn't need to amend very much. But nonetheless, I have to say that editing Andrea's work for posthumous publication was just an enormous, enormous privilege. And so too was the opportunity to be the first scholar to see and work on her extraordinary archive. I think that's given you a sense of why her archive as well as her published work is an enormously important body of literary material. I think that's about all I've got time for. So thank you for this. Thank you so much, Michael. In an ideal world, I would now have you all talking with each other and me, but we have to, we're going to have to press on to I've got time for just a couple of questions. I'm going to put two fairly quick ones to Bill and see if we have time for another one. From Lynn Genevieve, Bill asked what were Andrea's favorite books and authors, and then there's another from an auntie who asked did Andrea go to Jamaica, which I can tell you I can tell you and she did. But she goes on to ask did she find or get in touch with her relatives there are her relatives in Jamaica aware of her as an author or read her books. Bill, could you have a go at both of those, please? Yeah. Yes, I will. And I'll start with the last one. That's easy to answer. Yes. She did go to Jamaica, but only twice. I went with her each time. So the first time that she ever went to Jamaica was in the sort of late 80s for one Christmas time for a couple of weeks, and that was to stay with her aunt, her mother's sister who lived in Kingston. And this was an amazing trip because it was, and in a way it shadows what or sort of predates what actually she wrote about in Fruit of the Lemon because the main character in that made a similar trip. And it was very similar in a way in that she was introduced to family members that she didn't never knew existed. And it was an amazing journey for her. And it was it was the inspiration for writing the Fruit of the Lemon. She went once more, a good few years later when when she was researching the long song, and there stayed on a well met many friends and contacts and managed, we managed to stay on an old sugar plantation which gave her an enormous amount of research material for for the book. And in total, only, maybe only four weeks, four or five weeks in her life. She actually spent in the Caribbean. So, she was always a bit worried about being classified as a Caribbean writer for that very reason. Obviously, as we've all talked about, you know the Caribbean was absolutely central to her to her work and her life. On the other question what were her favorite this was this is the question that she always dreaded when she was giving talks, what were her favorite books, what were her favorite writers. Anyway, I don't know. I mean she was very Catholic in her taste she read lots of, she didn't have favorite writers she had favorite books. The book that she read when she was 23, I'll tell you that was a big doorstep of a book which was given to her by a friend, and it was the women's room by Marilyn French which was a sort of feminist novel that was that was very popular at the time I remember reading and that was what really turned her on to the power of, of, of literature. But beyond that, I'm, I don't think I can pull out any particular ones to mention I hope that'll give you something. Thank you. Thank you so much Bill we are, we are out of time for the questions and answers I want to finish with this quote from Alice Walker. Before we go on to hear another reading from Ella, when Alice Walker found Zora Neale Hurston the Harlem Nationals writers found her unmarked grave and and rallied people around it and got a headstone up and she said people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away it's our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and if necessary, bone by bone. And I hope for you what we've, what we've done here is is in the process of making sure that Andrea stays with us even as she's passed and that her work lives on in in not just in those who knew her and those who studied her but in the culture in which we live. And with that, I want to pass on to Ella, who's reading from memoir. Thank you so much to all the panelists Bill, Kwame, Melanie, and Michael, and thank you the audience. Hello again. I'm back reading an extract of Andrea Levy's memoir. I thought I'd write a memoir about my life. As soon as I had the idea, my mind began to buzz. Unfortunately, it did not buzz with the ideas about the memoir, but with 100 voices telling me a memoir, you, who the bloody hell do you think you are? Why on earth would anyone want to read a memoir of your life? Crikey, you think a lot of yourself don't you to think that a memoir is something you should write? Famous people write memoirs. You're not famous. People who've done something with their lives write memoirs. Not people like you. You're a working class girl from Highbury. What could you possibly put in a memoir that would be any good? Are you kidding? You haven't even been to Oxbridge. Don't fool yourself that people are interested in you because they're not. I always knew you had ideas above your station and this just bloody proves it. Do me a lemon. Pride comes before a fool, you know. You've lived a dull life, not an interesting one, etc. Oh, the list went on. I could fill a book, but I won't. But then, like Pandora's box, I had a little voice say, but you've lived through an incredible changing time and you're a black working class girl, a daughter of immigrants, some of the first from Jamaica. And you became a bestselling author and middle class taboo. I think there might be something in that experience worth writing about. Don't you? No, I don't. You stuck up cow. Oh, God. But my family are from the Caribbean. The history of these islands is very undertold in this country. My parents emigrated into 1948 England. That's all documented in small island. But what effect did it have on me or indeed on this country? I'll give me a break. Anyway, I'm doing it. So there. Next, write the story of the bus and the immigrant and the woman in the cafe or write the story of the grapevine day, then the history of my family. I'm a person who knew nothing until very recently about my ancestry. This has two effects. Stripping someone of their history makes them a no person. Believing my history began when my dad stepped off the wind rush kept me feeling unworthy of any right that I may have felt mine in this society. Learning about that history, piecing together if only sketchily a history that was mine is empowering. It has the reverse effect on the stripping away. You feel attached and worth something. But also, I began to feel angry at the lot that I had been born with being of no interest to the people who were the oppressors of us for a time, but now the society I live and work within. Keeping me stripped of history keeps me down subdued. Finding it and bringing it back makes me question and require answers. It also makes me demand that the British who carefully stripped that history, understand what they did, what effect that had on us and yes, make some redress for that.