Deborah Levy: 'If we don't read books by women, we're missing essential data'

The author on revisiting her early work, reading women writers – and the appeal of hypochondria

• Interview by Liz Hoggard - The Observer, Sunday 2 February 2014

Deborah Levy: 'Swimming suits novel writing.' Photograph: Dave M Benett/Getty Images

Born in apartheid South Africa in 1959 (her father was imprisoned for being a member of the ANC), Deborah Levy moved with her family to London in 1968. She started writing poems, plays and novels in the 1980s. Her 2011 novel, Swimming Home, a dark fable about a famous poet on a family holiday in the French Riviera, was published by the subscription-based press And Other Stories after having been turned down by mainstream publishers. It went on to be nominated for the Man Booker prize. Last year she published a collection of short stories, Black Vodka. Now Penguin is reprinting her 1994 novel, The Unloved, and two novellas, Beautiful Mutants (1986) and Swallowing Geography (1993), along with the paperback of her 2013 essay, Things I Don't Want to Know.

How does it feel to see new editions of books you wrote 20 years ago?
Amazing. It's like looking at an old photograph album of yourself and thinking, ooh, those are the clothes I was wearing then, and, where did I get those shoes?. The Unloved was written when I was pregnant and there's a photograph of me lying in bed in 1994 with my newborn baby girl and by my elbow are the proofs of the book. Beautiful Mutants was written when I was 27, during Thatcher's second term, very much a state-of-the-nation book.

Why was there a 15-year gap between your 1996 novel, Billy and Girl, and Swimming Home?
I was raising my kids, I was teaching, I was a fellow at the Royal College of Art. Maybe other female writers with children do better, but I need such ruthless attention when I write that it was very difficult to do that in the early days of my children. But I was writing short stories, and they became Black Vodka. So now, talking about my books, making a connection between works past and present, is a pleasure. I'm rediscovering things in the early work.
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