BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts

Lauren LeVernier, we're taking our summer break so until we're back on air we're showcasing

a few programs from our wonderful archive. As usual the music's been shortened for rights reasons.

This week's guest is the writer Andrea Levy, who died in 2019 at the age of 62.

Kirstie Young cast her away in 2011.

My cast away this week is the writer Andrea Levy, she is full of surprises.

A ward 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

Emery 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's 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 people so no not one experience at all.

The reason I write is because I am exploring my heritage and it's 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. What about the Dick Emery Christmas show? Oh yes I remember it very well. It was recorded

in July. Fakes snow, all of that. Fakes snow absolutely and what were you doing on it?

I was very lonely 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 you career at that point at the BBC ended with something of a whimpro because

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