deborah-levy-main-image-1800×1200.jpg

Interviews

Deborah Levy on the art of living

and other intimacies

The Position of Spoons

From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writer 
 
In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her – including a letter to her dying mother and to an absent friend. This volume illuminates and celebrates a rich and varied intellectual inheritance – and reflects on how it has enriched the author’s own work. Taking in questions of mortality, language, gender, place, consumerism and everyday living, the acclaimed novelist invites her reader behind the curtain of a creative life, ‘in which the position of the spoon is always changing’. 
 
‘Levy’s writing is dreamy but diamond-sharp, prismatic, droll, [and] devastating . . . Each sentence precisely pins down a feeling’ Los Angeles Review of Books 
 
‘Writing is self-excavation, a painful digging into the archaeology of our own experience. Levy is good on the prices we find ourselves paying: for art, for love, for fitting in . . . [She] plunges into the depths, taking us with her’ Guardian

A scorching, poignant collection of essays . . . Deborah Levy's new book shows why she's the patron saint of women's writing . . . This collection is the essence of Levy because it revolves around her various literary and artistic heroes – women, mainly – who provide succour for her writing soul . . . Levy touches on how each inspired her; many of Levy's readers, in turn, will be hoping for some of that same inspiration to rub off on them . . . A generous book with much to amuse, admire and often agonise over

[A] gifted and enlightening writer . . . 'Telegram to a Pylon Transmitting Electricity of Distances' is a montage of intimate and industrial images that tessellate beautifully. 'The Position of Spoons', an elegant, unnerving and perfectly paced little anecdote from the past, is strange and moving . . . Deborah Levy is invariably sharp and sprightly company

For all lovers of culture, and writers in particular, The Position of Spoons has many gems . . . You could lose an hour, an afternoon, in its considered prose: the distillation of decades of reading and writing, of Levy’s intellectual engagement with life on and off the page . . . A life spent in thrall to art

[Levy’s] writing is one radiant mise-en-scène after another . . . Dreamy but diamond-sharp, prismatic, droll . . . Each sentence precisely pins down a feeling, and with such economy . . . Her words are lit from within

A dream read for writers, creative thinkers and Levy devotees . . . No one writes with such precision and intimacy, and this book truly gives a glimpse at the mechanisms behind her talents

Supremely intelligent, accomplished and utterly in control of her craft . . . With details as acute as pinpricks of light through a black curtain, Levy captures contemporary life

Under the blowtorch of Levy’s attention, domestic space and everything in it is transformed into something radically meaningful . . . This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial

An absorbing essay collection . . . Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”

Levy writes skilfully on the complex interplay of self-presentation and effacement that’s often demanded of female creativity

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy: Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her. 
 
From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn the richness of the author’s own. Each page is a beautiful, tender composition of the questioning self: a portrait of Deborah Levy’s writing life and intellectual vitality in all of its dimensions.

August Blue

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO FINANCIAL TIMES, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, TIME MAGAZINE 
 
'Levy's lyrical, pitch-perfect prose is an exploration of our reasons for living, the forces that drive us and the inner music that controls the rhythms of our dance through life and love' Independent 
 
The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home 
 
At the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson - former child prodigy, now in her thirties - walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance. 
 
Now she is in Athens, watching as another young woman, a stranger but uncannily familiar - almost her double - purchases a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history. 
 
So begins a journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who bought the dancing horses. 
 
A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, August Blue uncovers the ways in which we seek to lose an old story, find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew. 
 
'Deborah Levy writes like a dream and I mean that quite literally' Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman 
 
'A virtuosic novel of identity and breakdown . . . [it] flickers constantly between comedy and darkness. You know you'll read August Blue again' M John Harrison, Guardian 
 
 
Sunday Times bestseller, May 2023

Intelligent and absurd, precise and dream-like . . . I know of few other authors who can capture an atmosphere of the eerie and the bizarre as well as she does

August Blue holds the remarkable balancing act that is key to Levy's writing: perfect precision at the sentence level combined with a dedication to exploring the slipperiness of reality

Playful inquisitiveness and lush descriptions balance out a bassline of melancholy . . . Nobody does enigmatic like Levy

[Levy] can sketch a scene with a few precise brushstrokes and conjure emotion out of white space on the page. A recurring call and response between Elsa and her alter ego becomes a musical refrain that takes on ever new colors. Those familiar references to swimming and bees glint through like leitmotifs

A gleeful read . . . [Deborah Levy's] prose is as quick and bare as ever, her manner excitingly abrupt . . . You know you'll read August Blue again

Levy's lyrical, pitch-perfect prose, where every word is weighted with significance, is an exploration of our reasons for living, the forces that drive us and the inner music that controls the rhythms of our dance through life and love

Deborah Levy's work inspires a devotion few literary authors ever achieve

August Blue is Levy's eighth novel, and since her 20s, she has been refining her ability to evoke feeling through writing rather than to narrate it. Her work is deeply influenced by art forms that express the embodied experience, like cinema and dance . . . Levy's writing is psychologically complex

[An] enigmatic novel . . . Deborah Levy's writing is rather like Philip Glass's music . . . mesmerising . . . enigmatic . . . refreshingly original

[A] wistful, fabular new novel . . . Since the 1990s, Deborah Levy's novels have combined a gauzy, episodic quality with pinpoint sensual detail drawn from peripatetic lives, crossing fluently between languages and national borders. Her style is full of gaps and sharp edges, circling around questions of gender and power, inheritance, autonomy and lack . . . The narrative here has a fittingly musical quality, running forward in spurts, pausing, repeating key phrases

Beautifully atmospheric . . . a dazzling portrait of melancholy and renewal . . . Levy is a master novelist and in August Blue, a beguiling story of how identities collide and crack, she shows us what it feels like to be a divided self

Deborah Levy delves into the deepest patterns of family connection and self-invention in August Blue, the riddling, elegant tale of a globe-trotting concert pianist whose subconscious is catching up with her

Deborah Levy's hazy, dreamlike novels, often set in sun-drenched Mediterranean backdrops, are an essential accompaniment to any summer holiday . . . a lyrical, surreal trip of self discovery - one that is full of Levy's wit and curious images

A meditation on artistic creativity that is sensual, enigmatic and strangely addictive

Financial Times 'What to Read this Summer'

Levy is no stranger to the uncanny. Her novels teem with oddness, with dreamlike, vertiginous scenes

Levy's elegantly ludic investigation into selfhood, mother love and meaning

Levy fans will delight in August Blue’s heady exploration of female creativity

At the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson - former child prodigy, now in her thirties - walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance. 
 
Now she is in Athens, watching as an uncannily familiar young woman purchases the last pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa soon begins a journey across Europe, on the run from her talent and her history, shadowed by the elusive woman with the dancing horses. 
 
A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, August Blue uncovers the ways in which we seek to lose an old story, find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.

30 Reflections from Exploring on Foot

Writers on Walks: A BBC Radio 3 Collection

22 writers talk about their memorable excursions and the act of walking, and share their creative observations 
 
In these six series, taken from BBC Radio 3's The Essay, an array of novelists, poets, journalists and biographers chart the varied and inspiring walks they have taken around Britain and elsewhere. Here are treks taken at daybreak and after dark; in winter and in spring; in the footsteps of the past; and - in the case of Robert Macfarlane - along the ridges of the South Downs. 
 
Dawnwalks and Night Walks find Nicholas Shakespeare, Nicola Barker, Kamila Shamsie, Ian Sansom, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Owen Sheers, Janice Galloway and John Walsh taking early morning and late-night strolls around locations ranging from their back garden and local cemetery to Manhattan, Paris, Tasmania and the Antarctic. 
 
Springwalks and Winterwalks feature Michele Roberts, Ross Raisin, John Walsh, Kirsty Gunn, Philip Hoare, Deborah Levy, Christopher Hope, Scarlett Thomas, Erica Wagner and Owen Sheers, as they sample the transforming qualities of spring and the wonders of winter. From Poland and the Languedoc to Hampstead Heath and the Yorkshire Wolds, they delight in the details of the landscape and reflect on what it means to them. 
 
Strange Strolls sees Jenn Ashworth, Michael Donkor, Stephanie Victoire, Nat Segnit and Sophie Coulombeau embarking on walks of entertaining eccentricity, revisiting favourite places including Wandsworth Bridge, the Blue Ridge mountains of Appalachia and Ibiza. 
 
And in A Five-Day Journey, Robert Macfarlane walks the length of the South Downs in monsoon rain and in sunshine, discovering its chalk trails and its ghosts. He ponders the relationship between paths and stories; explores the poet Edward Thomas' love affair with tracks; considers the concept of the Aboriginal Australian songline; re-imagines the life of artist Eric Ravilious; and contemplates the sometimes eerie relationship between walking, collecting and creation. 
 
Intimate, evocative and immersive, these 30 uplifting programmes transport us to a wealth of wonderful places, and offer fascinating personal insight into the inner worlds of our walker-writers. 
 
Production credits 
Produced by Duncan Minshull, Ciaran Bermingham and Tim Dee 
 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the following dates: 
 
Dawnwalks 
Nicholas Shakespeare 28 March 2016 
Nicola Barker 29 March 2016 
Kamila Shamsie 30 March 2016 
Ian Sansom 31 March 2016 
Lucy Hughes-Hallett 1 April 2016 
 
Night Walks 
Nicholas Shakespeare 27 October 2008 
Owen Sheers 28 October 2008 
Janice Galloway 29 October 2008 
Kamila Shamsie 30 October 2008 
John Walsh 31 October 2008 
 
Springwalks 
Michele Roberts in Poznan 31 March 2014 
Ross Raisin in the Yorkshire Wolds 1 April 2014 
John Walsh 2 April 2014 
Kirsty Gunn in Sutherland 3 April 2014 
Philip Hoare in Sholing 4 April 2014 
 
Winterwalks 
Deborah Levy on Hampstead Heath 18 February 2013 
Christopher Hope in Languedoc 19 February 2013 
Scarlett Thomas 20 February 2013 
Erica Wagner 21 February 2013 
Owen Sheers in Poland 22 February 2013 
 
Strange Strolls 
Jenn Ashworth - The Abiding Mental Riches of Preston 10 February 2020 
Michael Donkor - On Westminster Bridge 11 February 2020 
Stephanie Victoire - Dark Hollow Falls 12 February 2020 
Nat Segnit - The Other Ibiza 13 February 2020 
Sophie Coulombeau - Walking Matilda 14 February 2020 
 
A Five-Day Journey 
Marking 2 November 2009 
Haunting 3 November 2009 
Singing 4 November 2009 
Flying 5 November 2009 
Collecting 6 November 2009 
 
© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd.

Robert Macfarlane (Author) Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. 
 
Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh. 
 
Macfarlane and Morris's latest project, The Book of Birds, will be published in May 2026. Deborah Levy (Author) Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considred 'remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination' and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet' (Marina Warner, Independent). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography, all of which are published by Vintage. Kamila Shamsie (Author) Kamila Shamsie is the author of eight novels, which have been translated into over 30 languages. Her novels include Home Fire (2018) which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was long listed for the Man Booker Prize, Burnt Shadows which won the Premio Boccaccio in Italy, and A God in Every Stone which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award. She grew up in Karachi, has an MFA from the University of Manchester in Amherst, and now lives in London. Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Author) Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a cultural historian and critic. She is the author of Cleopatra, Queen, Lover, Legend and of Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. She reviews regularly for the Sunday Times Books Section. Ross Raisin (Author) Ross Raisin is the author of three novels: A Natural, Waterline and God's Own Country, which was shortlisted for nine literary awards. Ross has won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award and was named on Granta's most recent Best of Young British Novelists list. In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. 
Ross teaches at the University of Leeds, for the Guardian Masterclass programme and for the education charity First Story. He lives in York. Find more on Ross, his books and teaching here: www.rossraisin.com Nicholas Shakespeare (Author) Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in Asia and South America. One of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 1993, and considered by the Wall Street Journal as 'one of the best English novelists of our time', his prize-winning books have been translated into twenty-two languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Snowleg, The Dancer Upstairs, Inheritance, Priscilla, Six Minutes in May and acclaimed biographies of Bruce Chatwin and Ian Fleming. His most recent thriller featuring John Dyer was The Sandpit. He has been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Nat Segnit (Author) Nat Segnit's investigations into the human impulse to withdraw took him to India, Greece, the US and the Arctic Circle, until unforeseen circumstances forced his own retreat, along with the rest of humanity. He has written for the New Yorker, Harper's, 1843 magazine and the TLS, and regularly writes and broadcasts for BBC Radio 4. Retreat is his second book. Erica Wagner (Author) Erica Wagner is an author and journalist, born in New York City, but a resident of London. She attended Cambridge and the University of East Anglia, where she was taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. She went on to become the Literary Editor of The Times from 1996 to 2013. 
 
Erica is the author of Gravity (1997), a collection of short stories; Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (2000); and Seizure (2007). As well as editing First Light she is working on a new book, The Chief Engineer: A Biography of Washington Roebling, the Man Who Built Brooklyn Bridge. 
 
She has judged many literary prizes, including the Orange Prize, Whitbread First Novel Prize, Forward Prize for poetry and twice the Man Booker Prize. Nicola Barker (Author) Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of twelve novels – including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches – and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. Her latest novel, H(A)PPY, won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018.

Living Autobiography 3

Real Estate

From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the unmissable final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography'. 
 
'A beautifully crafted and thought-provoking snapshot of a life' The Evening Standard 
_________________________________ 
 
'I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.' 
 
Following the critical acclaim of Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it. 
_________________________________ 
 
'Real Estate is a book to dive into. Come on in, the water's lovely' The Daily Telegraph 
 
'Her reflections on domesticity, freedom and romance are so beautiful, I found myself underlining multiple sentences a page. Wry, warm and uplifting, it's a book I'll return to again and again' Stylist 
 
'[Levy's living autobiography series is] a glittering triple echo of books that are as much philosophical discourse as a manifesto for living and writing' Financial Times

A beautifully crafted and thought-provoking snapshot of a life

One of those wise books where you want to underline every sentence

Her reflections on domesticity, freedom and romance are so beautiful, I found myself underlining multiple sentences a page. Wry, warm and uplifting, it's a book I'll return to again and again.

The narrator of Real Estate is drily funny, irreverent, curious, even wise; she makes the reader want her for a companion . . . each of the books [in Levy's living autobiography series] bears several re-readings; together, they offer one version of how a woman might continually rewrite her own story.

Levy is experimenting with language in subversive ways

This is a work about what it means to be a writer: its reinventions, isolations, self-interrogations, its shifting penury and riches, both emotional and financial. . . [Levy's living autobiography series is] a glittering triple echo of books that are as much philosophical discourse as a manifesto for living and writing.

Lyrical sentences come naturally, full of cadence . . . She's particularly touching on the love between mothers and daughters, and funny too . . . Real Estate is a book to dive into. Come on in, the water's lovely.

Her voice - at once jokey and elliptical - is so casually intimate that it feels like catching up with an old friend . . . In three moving memoirs, Levy has perfectly fused the act of writing with the art of living.

Levy's intellectual energy is as frenetic as [the] dance floor, her memoirs a string of disparate pearls that entwine travelogue with philosophy and memory with literature

Expect fierce prose and bold meditations on what it means to be a woman.

Following the international critical and commercial success of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it. It resumes and expands Levy's pioneering examination of a female life lived in the storm of the present tense, asking essential questions about womanhood, modernity, creative identity and personal freedom. From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, Real Estate is a memoir and a manifesto for radical emancipation - as an artist, as a woman, and as an inheritor of the real estate of the now.

The Man Who Saw Everything

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019 
 SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2019 
 
 'An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of 20th century Europe' The Times 
_________________________________ 
 
 'It's like this, Saul Adler.' 
 'No, it's like this, Jennifer Moreau.' 
 
 In 1988, Saul Adler is hit by a car on the Abbey Road. Apparently fine, he gets up and poses for a photograph taken by his girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau. He carries this photo with him to East Berlin: a fragment of the present, an anchor to the West. 
 
But in the GDR he finds himself troubled by time - stalked by the spectres of history, slipping in and out of a future that does not yet exist. Until, in 2016, Saul attempts to cross the Abbey Road again . . . 
 _________________________________ 
 
'A time-bending, location-hopping tale of love, truth and the power of seeing. Thoroughly gripping' Sunday Telegraph 
 
 'Writing so beautiful it stops the reader on the page' Independent 
 
 'Levy splices time in artfully believable, mesmerizing strokes' Lambda Literary 
 
 'Skewering totalitarianism - from the state, to the family, to the strictures of the male gaze - Levy explodes conventional narrative to explore the individual's place and culpability within history' Guardian 
 
 'An utterly beguiling fever dream' Daily Telegraph

An utterly beguiling fever dream of a novel... Its sheer technical bravura places it head and shoulder above pretty much everything else on the [Booker] longlist

Writing so beautiful it stops the reader on the page

A time-bending, location-hopping tale of love, truth and the power of seeing... Increasingly surreal and thoroughly gripping

Exquisite... A brilliant Booker nominee... Ultimately, Levy is concerned with power &ndash; the forms it takes in our lives, the extent to which it is something we both possess and are subjected to

One of the big stories in English fiction this decade has been the return and triumph of Deborah Levy... You would call her example inspiring if it weren't clearly impossible to emulate

An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of the 20th century Europe

In one short and sly book after another, she writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both

Charged with themes spanning memory and mortality, beauty and time, it's as electrifying as it is mysterious

Intelligent and supple...a dizzying tale of life across time and borders

It's clever, raw and doesn't play by any rules

Superbly crafted, enigmatic, tantalizing... Levy defies gravity in a daring, time-bending new novel... Head-spinning and playful, her writing offers sophistication and delightful artistry

playful, consistently surprising...Levy brilliantly plumbs the divide between the self and others

In 1988, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is fine; he gets up and goes to see his girlfriend, Jennifer. They have sex and then break up. He leaves for the GDR, where he will have more sex (with several members of the same family), harvest mushrooms in the rain, bury his dead father in a matchbox and get on the wrong side of the Stasi. 
 
In 2016, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is not fine at all; he is rushed to hospital and spends the following days in and out of consciousness, in and out of history. Jennifer is sitting by his bedside. His very-much-not-dead father is sitting by his bedside. Someone important is missing.

Swallowing Geography

A stunning early novel by the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home, Deborah Levy. 
 
 Like her namesake Jack Kerouac, J.K. is always on the road, travelling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. From J.K.'s irreverent, ironic perspective, Levy charts a new, dizzying, end-of-the-century world of shifting boundaries and displaced peoples. 
_________________________________ 
 
'An exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield' Sunday Times 
 
 'Levy is a brilliant writer' Telegraph 
 
 'Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression' Jeanette Winterson

One of the few British writers comfortable on a world stage

An exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield

Like her namesake Jack Kerouac, J.K. is always on the road, travelling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. From J.K.'s irreverent, ironic perspective, Levy charts a new, dizzying, end-of-the-century world of shifting boundaries and displaced peoples.

Living Autobiography 2

The Cost of Living

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY 
WINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020 
 
Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, discover the powerful second memoir in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography'. 
 
 'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer 
 _________________________________ 
 
'Life falls apart. 
 We try to get a grip and hold it together. 
 And then we realise we don't want to hold it together . . .' 
 
 The final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography', Real Estate, is available now. 
_________________________________ 
 
 
'I just haven't stopped reading it . . . it talks so beautifully about being a woman' Billie Piper on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs 
 
'It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself. Wonderful' Guardian 
 
 'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise . . . a brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph 
 
 'A graceful and lyrical rumination on the questions, "What is a woman for? What should a woman be?"' Tatler 
 
 'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times

Deborah Levy is a most generous writer. What is wonderful about this short, sensual, embattled memoir is that it is not only about the painful landmarks in her life - the end of a marriage , the death of a mother - it is about what it is to be alive. I can't think of any other writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about the liminal, the domestic, the non-event, and what it is to be a woman... This is a little book about a big subject. It is about how to find a new way of living

Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor sharp insights

It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself... A piece of work that is not so much a memoir as an eloquent manifesto for what Levy calls 'a new way of living' in the post-familial world

Ingenious, practical and dryly amused... This is a manifesto for a risky, radical kind of life, out of your depth but swimming all the same

Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy is a brilliant writer... Each sentence is a small masterpiece of clarity and poise. That shed should be endowed with a blue plaque

This, from Deborah Levy, is exceptional. A memoir of life, art and separation. How to write when you're broke, have no writing space, are a parent. Also: crushed chickens, electric bikes, plumbing. Out in May and an early contender for one of the books of the year

Both memoir and feminist manifesto, her writing focuses so sharply on what it means to be alive that she's given me much-needed clarity...Levy subtly informs us about what it is to be a woman.

What does it mean to be free - as an artist, a woman, a mother or daughter? And what is the price of that freedom? 
 
In this dazzling memoir, Deborah Levy confronts the essential questions of modern womanhood with humour, pragmatism, and profoundly resonant wisdom. Reflecting on the period when she wrote the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Hot Milk - when her mother was dying, her daughters were leaving home, her marriage was coming to an end - she is characteristically eloquent on the social expectations and surreal realities of daily life. And expanding far beyond these bounds, she describes a uniquely frank, wise and thrilling manifesto for female experience: embracing the exhilarating terror of freedom, seeking to understand what that freedom could mean and how it might feel.

Living Autobiography 1

Things I Don't Want to Know

The first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood. 
 
'Unmissable. Like chancing upon an oasis, you want to drink it slowly . . . Subtle, unpredictable, surprising' Guardian 
_________________________________ 
 
 Taking George Orwell's famous essay, 'Why I Write', as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory as a young woman and shape it to her need. 
 
Things I Don't Want to Know is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers. 
 
The final two instalments in Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography', The Cost of Living and Real Estate, are available now. 
 _________________________________ 
 
'Superb sharpness and originality of imagination. An inspiring work of writing' Marina Warner 
 
'An exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield' Sunday Times 
 
'A writer whose anger and confusion in the face of the world transform into poetic flights of fancy . . . which always feel marvellously right' Independent

An up-to-date version of 'A Room of One's Own' . . .  I suspect it will be quoted for many years to come

Superb sharpness and originality of imagination. It is feminist and political while being an inspiring work of writing . . . She writes on the high wire, unfalteringly

Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression

One of the few contemporary British writers comfortable on a world stage

A writer whose anger and confusion in the face of the world transform into poetic flights of fancy . . . which always feel marvellously right

Taking George Orwell's famous essay, 'Why I Write', as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory and shape it to her need. It is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers. 
 
This first volume of the trilogy focuses on the writer as a young woman - the confusion and turbulence of youth, and the uncertainties of carving an identity as a writer. The second volume, The Cost of Living, speaks to the challenges of middle age as a writer and a woman - motherhood, separation, bereavement.

Swimming Home

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, read by Sophie Ward. 
 
A poet, his wife, her daughter and their friends arrive at the French Riviera. The prospect of a long hot summer stretches ahead of them. At their villa, they find a body in the swimming pool. 
 
But this body is very much alive. It is Kitty Finch: self-proclaimed botanist with lurid green fingernails, avid poetry fan, walking naked out of the water and straight into the centre of their holiday. 
 
Why is she there? What does she want from them? And why does the poet's wife invite this beautiful young woman to remain?

A poet, his wife, her daughter and their friends arrive at the French Riviera. The prospect of a long hot summer stretches ahead of them. At their villa, they find a body in the swimming pool. 
 
But this body is very much alive. It is Kitty Finch: self-proclaimed botanist with lurid green fingernails, avid poetry fan, walking naked out of the water and straight into the centre of their holiday. 
Why is she there? What does she want from them? And why does the poet's wife invite this beautiful young woman to remain?

The Unloved

A hypnotising summer novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home 
_________________________________ 
 
 A group of hedonistic West European tourists gather to celebrate Christmas in a remote French chateau. Then an Englishwoman is brutally murdered, and the sad, eerie child Tatiana declares she knows who did it. 
 
 The subsequent inquiry into the death proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of love, insatiable rage and sadistic desire. The Unloved offers a bold and revealing look at some of the events that shaped European and African history, and the perils of a future founded on concealed truth. 
 _________________________________ 
 
'Brave and brilliant, measured and lyrical' Independent 
 
'Levy's prose throbs its way into the imagination' Observer 
 
 'Startling, compelling, cool' The Times 
 
 'Levy's sense of dramatic form is unerring, and her precise, dispassionate prose effortlessly summons people and landscapes' New Yorker

A group of hedonistic West European tourists gather to celebrate Christmas in a remote French chateau. Then an Englishwoman is brutally murdered, and the sad, eerie child Tatiana declares she knows who did it. 
 
The subsequent inquiry into the death proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of love, insatiable rage and sadistic desire. The Unloved offers a bold and revealing look at some of the events that shaped European and African history, and the perils of a future founded on concealed truth.

Hot Milk

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING EMMA MACKEY AND FIONA SHAW 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2016 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016 
 
Plunge into this hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power - from the author of Swimming Home and The Man Who Saw Everything 
 
'Propulsive, uncanny, dreamlike. A feverish coming-of-age novel' Daily Telegraph 
 
'A triumph of storytelling' Literary Review 
_________________________________ 
 
'Today I dropped my laptop on the concrete floor of a bar built on the beach. My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I . . .' 
 
Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and the doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez - a man of questionable methods and motives. Intoxicated by thick heat and the seductive people who move through it, both women begin to see their lives clearly for the first time in years. 
 
Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless. 
_________________________________ 
 
'Perfectly crafted. So mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell' Independent on Sunday 
 
'Hot Milk treads a sweaty, sun-drenched path into the history books. A properly great novel' Romola Garai 
 
'Hot Milk is an extraordinary novel, beautifully rich, vividly atmospheric and psychologically complex... Every man and woman should read it' Bernardine Evaristo 
 
'Hypnotic... This novel has a transfixing gaze and a terrible sting that burns long after the final page is turned' Observer 
 
'Terrific, sizzling with heat and sexuality . . . You devour it in one sitting' Radio Times

Unsettling, challenging and gloriously written, Hot Milk by Deborah Levy is the multi-generational story of a hallucinatory sort of summer

Leaves the reader enraptured and unnerved

On the sun-bleached coast of Almería, southern Spain, Sofia and her mother have arrived in search of a cure to an illness which has mystified doctors. This simmering, hypnotic story, adapted into a film starring Emma Mackie, shows just what a trip abroad can reveal

Publisher's description. Shortlisted for the Man Booker and Goldsmiths prizes, a hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power under the scorching midday sun. Sofia and her mother arrive on the Spanish coast looking for answers - what they find there will be strange, seductive and fearsome beyond their wildest dreams.

A unique atmosphere, the dense dreamscape of echoes and repetitions ensure its peculiar lasting power

Astute, poetic and wise, Hot Milk confirms Deborah Levy's reputation as a master of the contemporary psychological novel

Darian Leader, author of 'What Is Madness?'

A fizzing combination of the fantastical and the mundane

Perfectly crafted, a dream-narrative so mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell. Reaching the end is like finding a piece of glass on the beach, that can be held up and looked into and kept, in secret, to be looked at again and again.

A smart, seductive and utterly beguiling read

Hypnotic... this novel has a transfixing gaze and a terrible sting that burns long after the final page is turned

Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and the doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez - a man of questionable methods and motives. Intoxicated by thick heat and the seductive people who move through it, both women begin to see their lives clearly for the first time in years. 
 
Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless.

Beautiful Mutants

The stunning debut novel from the two-time Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy. 
_________________________________ 
 
Levy's surreal and artful first novel, Beautiful Mutants, introduces Lapinski -- the manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a number of urban pilgrims in a shimmering contemporary allegory about broken dreams and desires . . . 
 _________________________________ 
 
'A stunningly original writer' Kirsty Gunn 
 
 'It throbs its way into the imagination like the unguided missiles it decries' Observer 
 
 'Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression' Jeanette Winterson

It throbs its way into the imagination like the unguided missiles it decries

Lapinski, a manipulative and magical Russian exile, summons forth a number of highly contemporary urban pilgrims. Through them, Levy explores broken dreams and self-destructive desires in a shimmering, dislocated allegory of its times.

Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography

Early Levy

Early Levy comprises two pioneering early works by Man Booker-shortlisted writer Deborah Levy. 
 
BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS 
 
Lapinski, a manipulative and magical Russian exile, summons forth a number of highly contemporary urban pilgrims. Through them, Levy explores broken dreams and self-destructive desires in a shimmering, dislocated allegory of its times. 
 
&amp; SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY 
 
Like her namesake Jack Kerouac, J.K. is always on the road, travelling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. From J.K.'s irreverent, ironic perspective, Levy charts a new, dizzying, end-of-the-century world of shifting boundaries and displaced peoples. 
 
 
'She storms through the back door, refusing to be weighed down with rationalist and aesthetic baggage . . . [This] is a world on the brink of destruction but it's going down with a barnyard laugh and an explosive extravagance of imagination' Blitz 
 
'It throbs its way into the imagination like the unguided missile it decries' Observer on Beautiful Mutants 
 
Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she is the author of numerous highly praised books including Things I Don't Want to Know and The Unloved, both of which are now published by Penguin. Her novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards (UK Author of the Year) and 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.

She storms through the back door, refusing to be weighed down with rationalist and aesthetic baggage . . . [This] is a world on the brink of destruction but it's going down with a barnyard laugh and an explosive extravagance of imagination

It throbs its way into the imagination like the unguided missile it decries

Distilled images of vital and unsettling power. Levy is one of the few contemporary British writers comfortable on a world stage

BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS 
 
Lapinski, a manipulative and magical Russian exile, summons forth a number of highly contemporary urban pilgrims. Through them, Levy explores broken dreams and self-destructive desires in a shimmering, dislocated allegory of its times. 
 
&amp; SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY 
 
Like her namesake Jack Kerouac, J.K. is always on the road, travelling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. From J.K.'s irreverent, ironic perspective, Levy charts a new, dizzying, end-of-the-century world of shifting boundaries and displaced peoples.

Deborah Levy

Wonderfully entertaining . . . a witty scherzo of a “fiction” . . . We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy – this is “a fiction”, after all – but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is – odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining – triumphantly proving her wrong

Deborah Levy is that rare thing: an author who has mastered fiction and non-fiction. Here she does each with a fictionalised account of real events in the life of the American writer Gertrude Stein. It sounds impossibly chic

The Times, 'The 58 books to look out for in 2026'

I absolutely loved Deborah Levy’s blending of fiction, biography, and existential pondering in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein . . . An ode to female brilliance, to the avant-garde, to queerness, to Paris

Financial Times, 'Best summer books of 2026'

A marvellously original book, a hybrid of fiction and literary portrait. It’s gorgeously written – like all her other books – and utterly beguiling

Run away to Paris with this delightful adventure of friendship that follows narrator Deborah with friends Eva and Fanny as they cook, walk, read and ask who was Gertrude Stein? This exploration of the American poet and art collector who was friends with Picasso and Hemingway is truly a delight

Elle, 'The Most Hyped Books We Can’t Wait To Read In 2026'

Fans of Deborah Levy won’t be disappointed by her latest novel, ostensibly an exploration into the life and work of American avant-garde poet and thinker Gertrude Stein, but at its heart, a story about how we choose to navigate our own lives and anxieties. You don’t need to know much, if anything, about Stein to become immediately swept up in the story . . . Levy ruminates on the pleasures and sorrows of friendship and how our own stories evolve

AnOther Magazine, 'Ten books to add to your reading list in 2026'

In this delightfully genre-blurring work of first-person fiction about three friends living in the French capital, each is searching for something, whether her next erotic encounter, a missing cat unhelpfully named “it”, or an endpoint for an essay on the radical modernist writer Gertrude Stein. Here, we learn a lot about Stein, not least that she dressed like a monk, found question marks revolting and preferred to drive with one hand brandishing a chicken leg. Along the way, both writers show us how language – and life itself –can be deconstructed and put together anew

Observer (The 20 Books to Read this Summer)

A boundary pushing work of which the modernist would be proud . . . It is playful, experimental, formally innovative yet also grounded in a realist approach. It is original. As Levy’s narrator observes of Stein: “Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen" . . . A compelling contemporary fiction

The brilliant Deborah Levy returns with a new novel that spills over the boundaries of its genre. On the fictional side is the unnamed narrator, discovering herself in the context of new friends, new experiences and a new country. But rising from this narrative is an exploration of a real life literary legend, as the narrator studies the life and work of the modernist icon Gertrude Stein. The result is a stunning portrait of two time periods and two women, fictional and otherwise, seen through the lenses of each other

GQ, 'The books we can't wait to read in 2026'

Levy's writing is eccentric, intelligent and capacious

A brilliant sketch of what Stein termed a ‘lost generation' and an intelligent meditation on the peculiarly modern impossibility of truly knowing one another – or ourselves – and the imperative to keep trying

There are many of us who read everything Deborah Levy writes. Devotees will be delighted toget hold of My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein. It’s both aportrait of the influential Stein and a fictional story, as Levy’s narrator heads to the Left Bank toexplore the godmother of modernism and mentor to everyone from F Scott Fitzgerald andHemingway to Picasso. An enticing prospect ideally to be read with a coffee by the Seine

Deborah Levy, twice shortlisted for the Goldsmiths and the Booker, returns with My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein – a novel that doesn't sound like one – in which a woman wrestles with the significance of the celebrated modernist

New Statesman, 'The best fiction of 2025'

At first glance, the title of Deborah Levy's next book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, suggests she is releasing another of her beloved "living autobiographies". But this is fiction, albeit in an inventive form, blending a portrait of Stein with a story of friendship and self-discovery

BBC, 'The 40 most exciting books to look forward to in 2026'

A portrait of friendship which becomes a portrait of Gertrude Stein, too, spanning from the 19th Century to today

Glamour, '11 books by women for your book club era in 2026'

Levy is such a confident, singular writer and her hybrid books – this one is a blend of fiction, literary criticism and biography – always have the potential to surprise, with the kind of observant sentences that make you want to stop, lay your book face down and think for a minute. Perfect for lazy afternoons when you just want to read a few pages

A Fiction

Who was Gertrude Stein? 
 
Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius — a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. 
 
And why does she matter? 
 
The narrator of Deborah Levy’s latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. 
 
As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first. 
 
This is a book about how we put ourselves together— an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world.

Deborah Levy

Books by Deborah Levy

Series by Deborah Levy

Living Autobiography

Articles featuring Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy on the art of living

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter