Andrea Levy: Small Island and Long Song author dies aged 62

British author Andrea Levy, whose award-winning novels captured the black British experience in the years after Windrush, has died at the age of 62.

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

Levy was born in 1956 to Jamaican parents who had travelled to England on the Empire Windrush in 1948.

She was best known for the best-selling Small Island, about two Jamaicans who came to England after World War Two, and The Long Song, her last novel.

The 2010 novel was nominated for the Booker Prize and was adapted by BBC One last year.

Unlike her other four novels, The Long Song was not set in post-war Britain but reached back to early 19th Century Jamaica during the last years of slavery.

Sir Lenny Henry, who played a slave in the series, said he had “loved hanging out with this pugnacious woman”.

“She was funny, had attitude and was immensely smart,” he wrote in a tribute.

Her publisher Headline said it was “hugely saddened” by her death on 14 February, adding that she “had been ill for some time”.

Actress and director Kathy Burke said Levy was “such a great writer” and that The Long Song had been “the best thing on telly last Christmas”.