Andrea Levy death: Small Island author and Windrush generation chronicler dies aged 62

Small Island author Andrea Levy, whose award-winning novels captured the black British experience in the years after Windrush, has died aged 62.

A statement released on behalf of her family said she died of cancer.

Levy is best known for the 2004 novel Small Island, which launched her literary career after it won the 2004 Orange Prize, the Whitbread book of the year and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Her last novel, 2010's The Long Song, was nominated for the Booker Prize and adapted by the BBC one last year.

Levy, who wrote about the experiences of the Windrush generation in Britain, was born in London in 1956, the child of Jamaican parents.

They had emigrated to the UK from Jamaica in 1948 and she and her siblings grew up on a council estate by the Arsenal football ground and were the only black family in the area at the time.

She later went on to study textiles at Middlesex Polytechnic and it was not until she was in her 30s that she began to write, having attended a creative writing class at an adult education college in London.

Levy had been writing for around a decade when, aged 48, Small Island won a slew of awards.

The novel, which was also made into an acclaimed BBC drama in 2009, was about two postwar London couples (one Jamaican, the other British).

The story of Hortense and Gilbert, who arrive in London from Jamaica in 1948 hoping for a better way of life only to discover Blitz-bombed streets, bad weather and racism was inspired by her parents.

Her father Winston arrived in Britain on board the Empire Windrush and, like Gilbert, worked at the post office. Her mother, like Hortense, was a trained teacher who followed her husband six months later.

She only discovered that her father came over on the famous immigrant ship when it was shown on television and he casually mentioned it.