Andrea Levy wins
Walter Scott prize
The Long Song takes £25,000 award for historical fiction
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 June 2011 16.02 BST
'Very honoured' ... Andrea Levy. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Andrea Levy's story of the end of slavery, The Long Song, has won the £25,000 Walter Scott prize for historical fiction.
Told as the memoir of an old Jamaican woman who was once a slave on a sugar-cane plantation in early 19th-century Jamaica, The Long Song beat titles including David Mitchell's tale of 18th-century Japan, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Tom McCarthy's experimental take on the life of a first world war radio operator, C, to win the award.
Levy said she was "very honoured" to have been chosen by judges as this year's winner. "This is a generous literary prize which focuses attention on an important aspect of the role of fiction. Fiction can – and must – step in where historians cannot go because of the rigour of their discipline. Fiction can breathe life into our lost or forgotten histories," said the author, who won the Orange prize for her evocation of a Jamaican immigrant couple in postwar London, Small Island.
"My subject matter has always been key to what and why I write – the shared history of Britain and those Caribbean islands of my heritage," she added. "So lastly I would like to remember all those once-enslaved people of the Caribbean who helped to make us all what we are today."
The judging panel, which included children's author Elizabeth Laird and journalist and historical novelist Allan Massie, said The Long Song was "quite simply a celebration of the triumphant human spirit in times of great adversity".
"Andrea Levy brings to this story such personal understanding and imaginative depth that her characters leap from the page, with all the resilience, humour and complexity of real people," they said in a statement. "There are no clichés or stereotypes here."
The Walter Scott prize is sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Scott, and uses Scott's famous novel Waverley to pin down what constitutes historical fiction: events must have taken place at least 60 years before publication, making them outside the author's own "mature personal experience". Last year's inaugural award was won by Hilary Mantel, for her story of the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall.
__________________________
Guardian book club podcast:
Andrea Levy
The writer explains how Small Island was driven by a wish to write about her parents' experience as immigrants, and that of the white British who met them
Andrea Levy explains to the book club that the motivation driving Small Island was a wish to better understand both her parents' generation – her father being among the generation of West Indians who arrived in England on the Empire Windrush – and the experience of the white English getting used to their new neighbours.
She says that during the research for the book, she was very struck by the differences between the reception met in wartime Britain by black American and Caribbean soldiers: how the former, living in segregated barracks, were met with immediate hostility; while the Caribbeans only began to encounter discrimination in the late 40s as the Windrush generation settled in England.
The novelist also talks about Small Island's structure, which moves backwards and forwards in time around the pivot of 1948 (and how only American reviewers were able to get the hang of this). The structure, she explains, was only constructed after she had finished writing the book, weaving together bits of the story written at different times. The title itself, she says, was something she only found after the novel was completed.
The craft of writing, meanwhile, she says was a skill she learnt from watching TV rather than reading books.
__________________________
Small Island by
Andrea Levy
Week three: Andrea Levy on how her book emerged through her own family history
- The Guardian, Saturday 22 January 2011
I hadn't realised I was starting a novel, I thought I was just being curious about my own family history when, in my 40s, I finally got my mum to tell me about her experiences of emigrating from Jamaica to Britain. She always claimed that I was never interested in her past when I was younger. But the way I remember it, neither she nor my dad ever seemed to want to talk about their lives in Jamaica, or about why in 1948 they made the momentous decision to leave that island to come to another. Whatever the truth, that silence was finally breached and my mother, reluctantly, began to speak to me about her life before I was born. I was gripped from the start as those two familiar parents of mine began to emerge as fully rounded human beings with an amazing story to tell.
- Small Island
- by Andrea Levy
- Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
My dad had died in the 1980s, but I remember him mentioning, almost in passing, that he had sailed to this country on a ship called the Empire Windrush. Over the next decade or so the name of that ship kept cropping up – in TV documentaries, books, newspaper articles. By the mid-90s there was even talk of the "Windrush generation". The arrival of that ship in 1948, with its 492 West Indian migrants looking for work and betterment in the mother country had become an important moment in our recent history – a point at which British society began to change. And he was one of the pioneers. My Dad!
I wanted to explore the relationship that the Caribbean islands had with Britain. After all it was no accident, no sticking a pin in a map, which brought my parents here. It was a legacy of the British empire. My parents believed themselves to be British. They really thought they would be welcomed here. They really did get a shock.
But throughout my mum's story of arriving in England, she would talk about the white English people she met. Some she dismissed with a wave of her hand, but others she would talk of fondly. That they helped her, and made an impact on her, was clear. I realised if I was going to tell this story I had to tell it from all sides. Not only the immigrants' tale, but also from the point of view of the people that those immigrants came to live among. Their lives were changed by that migration to Britain just as my parents' lives were.
I had also been talking to my mother-in-law about her childhood. She had grown up in the 1920s and 30s on a farm in the East Midlands. Those conversations became very important in forming Queenie's back-story. In my mother-in-law's conversations she talked about her husband, who died in the 1960s and who I never met. He had been in the RAF in Burma during the second world war. I suddenly realised what a catalyst the war must have been. That conflict was barely over when my parents arrived in bombed-out London.
I was also struck by how much my parents and my parents-in-law would have had in common despite the obvious difference of the colour of their skin. What would have happened if by some chance they could have met at that time? Would they have been able to discover this common ground? That's when I began to imagine four people – two white English, two black Jamaican – in a rundown house in Earls Court in 1948. What happened to them to bring them to that place and time? And what would they think of each other?
So the book was started. At first I was very nervous writing a totally researched book. Unlike my previous novels I was venturing out of my own experience and into another world. But it became so fascinating that the fears disappeared. I read books, old newspapers, visited archives and museums, watched films. I talked to war veterans and people who had lived through those times. I immersed myself in the period I was writing about, the speech, the attitudes, even the music and the styles of dress. It was such fun. Four distinct characters began to form in my head, and all of them seemed to demand that they tell their own stories. So four first-person narratives became the structure of the novel. And as I explored their stories I came to better understand the relationship between the country of my birth and the country of my heritage. Small Island was a joy to write and those characters will stay with me forever. It became a work of fiction, but for me it still remains something of a family history, too.