Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy's fourth novel, Small Island, won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her latest novel, The Long Song, is the tale of a girl born on a 19th-century Jamaican sugar plantation.

From her Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:

What book changed your life?

The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. Before then I’d thought I didn’t like fiction. I was 23 and I hadn’t read a book before. It awakened me to feminism, too.

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Which literary character most resembles you?

At the moment, Bertha Rochester from Jane Eyre. I’m very jittery when I have a book coming out.

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If you could own any painting, what would it be?

“The Ambassadors” by Holbein, although I’d never get it into the house.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue