Andrea Levy was an English author best known for the novels Small Island (2004) and The Long Song (2010). She was born in London to Jamaican parents, and her work explores topics related to British Jamaicans and how they negotiate racial, cultural and national identities.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point of view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.
The Baptist War, also known as the Sam Sharp Rebellion, the Christmas Rebellion, the Christmas Uprising and the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt of 1831–32, was an eleven-day rebellion that started on 25 December 1831 and involved up to 60,000 of the 300,000 slaves in the Colony of Jamaica. The uprising was led by a black Baptist deacon, Samuel Sharpe, and waged largely by his followers. The revolt, though militarily unsuccessful, played a major part in the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire.
The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which provided for the gradual abolition of slavery in most parts of the British Empire. Passed by Earl Grey's reforming administration, it expanded the jurisdiction of the Slave Trade Act 1807 and made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire, with the exception of "the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company", Ceylon, and Saint Helena. The Act came into force on 1 August 1834, and was repealed in 1998 as a part of wider rationalisation of English statute law; however, later anti-slavery legislation remains in force.
Susan Wooldridge is a British actress. She won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Hope and Glory (1987). Her television credits include Jewel in the Crown, (1984), All Quiet on the Preston Front (1994–95), and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (2005).
Hayley Elizabeth Atwell is a British and American actress. After appearing in various West End productions, Atwell gained popularity for her roles in period-drama films, appearing in the films Brideshead Revisited (2008), The Duchess (2008) and the miniseries The Pillars of the Earth (2010); for the latter two, she was nominated for a British Independent Film Award and a Golden Globe Award respectively.
Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Oneworld Publications is a British independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey originally to publish accessible non-fiction by experts and academics for the general market. Based in London, it later added a literary fiction list and both a children's list and an upmarket crime list, and now publishes across a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, current affairs, popular science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, as well as literary fiction, crime fiction and suspense, and children's titles.
Small Island is a novel written by British author Andrea Levy.
The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is a British literary award founded in 2010. At £25,000, it is one of the largest literary awards in the UK. The award was created by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, who is generally considered the originator of historical fiction with the novel Waverley in 1814.
Lorene Cary is an American author, educator and social activist.
Jack Andrew Lowden is a British actor. Following a four-year stage career, his first major international onscreen success was in the 2016 BBC miniseries War & Peace, which led to starring roles in feature films.
Sarah Williams is a British producer and screenwriter perhaps best known for writing the scripts to the 2005 television film Wallis & Edward and co-writing the 2007 feature film Becoming Jane. For her work adapting the novels Poppy Shakespeare and Small Island for television, Williams received two Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award nominations.
The Book of Night Women is a 2009 novel by Jamaican author Marlon James. The book was first published in hardback on February 19, 2009, by Riverhead Books. The story follows Lilith, a young woman born into slavery, who challenges the boundaries of what is expected of her.
Andrea Stuart is a Barbadian-British historian and writer, who was raised in the Caribbean and the UK and now lives in the UK. Her biography of Josephine Bonaparte, entitled The Rose of Martinique, won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize in 2004. Although her three published books so far have been non-fiction, she has spoken of working on a novel set in the 18th century.
Howards End is a drama television series based on the 1910 novel of the same name by E. M. Forster. The series was adapted by Kenneth Lonergan, directed by Hettie MacDonald, and stars Hayley Atwell. The four-part series is a co-production between British network BBC One and American network Starz. It premiered on 12 November 2017 in the United Kingdom and 8 April 2018 in the United States.
Tamara Naomi Lawrance is a British actress. She is known for her performances as Prince Harry's republican girlfriend in the 2017 BBC television film King Charles III, and as Viola in the 2017 production of Twelfth Night at the National Theatre cinecast internationally on NT Live. In 2018 she received the second prize at the Ian Charleson Awards for this performance as Viola.
The Long Song is a three-part BBC television serial, which is an adaptation of Andrea Levy's 2010 historical novel of the same name.
Small Island is a 2019 play by Helen Edmundson based on the 2004 novel of the same name by Andrea Levy. It tells the deeply connected stories of three people against the backdrop of the complex history of the United Kingdom and Jamaica. It premiered at the National Theatre in 2019 to critical acclaim.
The Silent Twins is a 2022 internationally co-produced biographical drama film about the twin sisters, June and Jennifer Gibbons, who were institutionalized at Broadmoor Hospital following years of silence and teenage rebellion. It was directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska from a screenplay by Andrea Seigel, who adapted the book of the same name by Marjorie Wallace. The film stars Letitia Wright, Tamara Lawrance, Nadine Marshall, Treva Etienne, Michael Smiley, and Jodhi May.
