Andrea Levy has won the 2004 Whitbread Book Awards with her fourth novel, Small Islands. The book is based around her parents’ experience of moving from Jamaica to post-war England ‘to start a better life’. The announcement was made yesterday evening (Tuesday 25 January) at an awards ceremony held at The Brewery in Central London.
From the complete shortlist for the Whitbread prize, a winner is picked from each of five categories: novel, first novel, biography, poetry, and children’s. An overall winner is then selected from the five category winners. The Whitbread Book Awards website offers previous shortlists and winners stretching back to 1971.
Small Islands has already won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, which is open only to women.