Andrea Levy scholarship to assist black students

LONDON: A scholarship in the name of the late award-winning author Andrea Levy is encouraging individuals from black African and Caribbean heritage, facing socio-economic challenges, to apply for financial support.

The Andrea Levy Scholarship was established in 2020, at Edinburgh University, in memory of the novelist who was born in London to Jamaican parents.

The writer enjoyed longstanding family and personal links to the Scottish city. The scholarship will cover the tuition fees of successful applicants, who will also receive a sum of £5,000 per annum to help with living expenses.

The full cost of tuition fees, for UK students is £9,250 per annum.

Author and journalist Gary Younge, who was a friend of Andrea Levy, commenting on the scholarship, said, “This year we are particularly interested in African Caribbean students, but anyone who is a black Briton can apply.”

Ruwedya Ahmed, a recipient of the Andrea Levy scholarship, shared on the benefits she has enjoyed.

She said, “I’m extremely grateful for the equity that the Andrea Levy Scholarship gives to students like me. It helps me feel like I belong.

“It gave me a chance to not have money anxieties or worries about missing out or feeling left behind because of having to juggle a job, socialising, and studies.

“It’s very easy for students like me to feel different or alienated in tutorials, but now I feel I can experience university fully, and feel at home in Edinburgh.

“My scholarship has helped minimise my imposter syndrome and it has helped reinstate confidence in my ability.”

Levy was renowned for her 2004 book, ‘ Small Island’, which focused on the Windrush generation, and ‘ The Long Song’, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Applications for students starting their studies in September 2024 are now open and the deadline to complete applications is April 8, 2024.

The criteria for the scholarship include being individuals with a household income below £34,000 per year. Priority will be given to applicants whose household income is assessed as £23,999 or less.

Applicants will be expected to provide a statement of 600 to 900 words, outlining achievements, academically and/or personally.

Students will also need to explain how the scholarship will be beneficial to their studies, and how it would help them achieve their academic goals and benefit their community.

TURNING POINTFollowing the writer’s death from breast cancer in 2019 at the age of 62, Sir Lenny Henry, the actor, said in tribute,”She was funny, had attitude and was immensely smart.”

Poet Benjamin Zephaniah said of Levy following her death in 2019: “In the future if anybody wants to have a look at how the Windrush generation arrived here and how we the sons and daughters of the Windrush generation survived and are surviving, they have to refer to Andrea’s work.”

Levy did not start writing until she was in her mid-30s, after enrolling in a creative writing class at an adult education college in London.

It was not until the release of Small Island in 2004 that her writing rose in popularity, with this novel earning her the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

The novel was critically acclaimed for its tales of Jamaicans who moved from their own small island to Britain, and the Britons in whose home they lodged.

The writer’s father, Winston Levy, travelled to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948, and was joined six months later by his wife, Amy (nee Ridguard), who had been trained as a schoolteacher in Kingston, Jamaica.

A visit to her mother’s family in Jamaica during 1996 was a turning point in her life. After the experience Levy said that there was a realisation that she had “a background and an ancestry that were fascinating and worth exploring”.

In Six Stories and an Essay (2014), an autobiography about Levy’s early life growing up in London she described how the visit changed her attitude toward her Jamaican heritage from shame to pride, and how writing gave her the means to explore that heritage.

Further information on the scholarship is available at:

www.ed.ac.uk/student-funding/undergraduate/uk-eu/access-awards/andrea-levy.