Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the writer Andrea Levy. She is full of surprises.

Award-winning and highly regarded, she didn't read a book till she was 23.

And there surely can't be another significant figure of the literary establishment

who's worked on the Dick Emory Christmas show.

But perhaps most surprising of all, for someone whose father came to Britain on the windrush and who so vividly depicts the experiences of Caribbean immigrants,

she says that growing up, she didn't really think of herself as black, adding that when she

began writing she wasn't writing about being black, she was writing about being human.

You might well then be held up Andrea as this sort of ideal articulate

spokesperson for the Black Experience but it sounds to me like you don't really think

there is a Black Experience to write about. Well a Black Experience is an experience of many millions of millions of people so no not one

experience at all the reason I write is because I am exploring my heritage and

its relationship to Britain and you know all sorts of

things like that and there's still a lot of that story untold. We'll talk more

about that and what about the Dick Henry Christmas show? Oh yes, I remember it very well. It was recorded in July.

Fake snow, all of that. I imagine it.

Absolutely. And it was great. What were you doing on it? I was very lowly employed in the BBC in the costume department.

It was a great job.

I loved being on set and just watching everybody doing their stuff and having Christmas in July was wonderful.

And your career at that point at the BBC ended with something of a whimper because your contract

...