Deborah Levy

Tell me about your time at Dartington College of Arts. It was a different route for you to take. Did it fulfil your expectations?

I think it was the best four years of my life in some ways, because it was in the countryside, there wasn't a day I was bored, it was where I was finding my voice as a playwright, and I look back on that time and I just feel happy thinking about it.

You spent five years working on your novel Swimming Home, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012, but I think at first you couldn't find a publisher for it. Why not?

The book that was a opposed not to have any economic strength, I think that's how it was put, went on to sell very well indeed. I was writing Swimming Home towards the end of my marriage. I knew that we were going to separate and that would be the first novel that I had written for a very long time. I used to write it at night when my children were sleeping. I remember at four in the morning, there was a car alarm that used to go off. And I think, oh yes, good. I get some sleep now. And that was the novel actually that changed my life because when I separated from my husband and that book had been nominated for the Booker Prize, it was a sort of strange time of extreme unhappiness and shock and jubilation and pleasure. It was all happening at the same time.

You started a new chapter in 2019 when you went to live in Paris for a year, just before your sixtieth birthday. How did you mark the occasion?

Oh, it was great. Can you imagine? Ideas, imagination, enough money, reading Annie or No by The Sen. One of the fellows was DJ Imaka Ogbo. And he said, when I was feeling a bit blue about my sixtieth and wondering if my life added up to anything, and if I had achieved anything worthwhile, and had there been enough love and loving and you know, all those sort of questions when when you're about to turn sixty, he said, well, I'm going to be DJing at Silencio, which was a club designed and started by David Lynch and I think you should have your birthday party there. And that's exactly what I did. My daughters couldn't believe how cool their mother was and that they were coming to Silencio. Neither could I.

Your father eventually returned to South Africa and I know he became disappointed by the corruption there. Have you been back to the country often?

When my father returned, after Nelson Mandela was released, we used to go visit him maybe once a year. It was always very emotional. My father died in South Africa. My mother died in Britain. One of the things that he used to do, he was an absent father most of my life, but also very present and engaged. I don't know how he managed to do that, but he did. I used to send him photographs of fruit from a grocery store in London, mangoes and papayas and melons. and I'd say, which one do you think I should buy? Because he he always knew which one was ripe. And he'd study the photo in Cape Town and he'd say, The last one on the left. And it was always the case that he was right. And so. When he was dying and I was saying goodbye to him and he was saying, what are you thinking? I was thinking, I've said goodbye to you so many times in my life, but this is the final goodbye. And I guess that the fact that he died there and my mother in Britain sort of really encapsulates who I am, you know, a bit from here and a bit from there, a long journey in between.