Book Festival: Andrea Levy gets back to her roots

Andrea Levy’s Book Festival appearance comes on the back of an impressive string of awards. She’s won the Orange Prize for female-authored literature, been longlisted for the coveted Man Booker prize, and picked up an award for her self-narrated audio books.

These speaking skills were on display in Edinburgh as she entranced the audience by adopting an exquisite Jamaican lilt when reading from her new novel The Long Song. Set on the Caribbean island around the time of the abolition of slavery, the book’s narrator is an intelligent, redoubtable female slave named July, who offers wry criticism of the literature of the time. “I was shocked that so sacred an act as reading could invite a white lady to belch foolishness at me” July observes of the lightweight novels of the time in her introduction.

Though starting off as a novelist relatively late in life, Levy has been a fixture of the book festival circuit for some time. The packed out crowd has her delighted, and she joked about hoping for a rainy day so that people would come to see her to get shelter from the rain.

Dealing with the “endemic” 19^th century racism was not easy for her when researching the book. She described how even the most enlightened liberal philosophers of the time viewed “the negro race” as inherently inferior, and she pulled no punches when discussing Scotland’s past as a slave-owning power.

“You can’t get past it... so many of the plantation owners had Scottish names” she remarked, slipping effortlessly back into her native London accent. Researching and writing the book was not easy for her, as of course there were hardly any first-hand accounts of slavery available from the slaves’ point of view. In addition, her Caribbean heritage meant that the novel had great personal significance.

A particularly interesting moment came when the event’s chair, Guardian arts writer Charlotte Higgins, asked her about fellow writer and Book Festival attendee AS Byatt’s description of the Orange Prize as “sexist.”  Disagreeing, she replied that the award was there because female authors struggled to have their work taken seriously, a problem she felt still existed. This will no doubt prove to be a subject of keen debate between the two celebrated writers.