My mother, Andrea Lewenstein, who has died aged 72, was a writer, poet and creative writing teacher who lived with the chronic illness ME for many years.
Despite her illness, Andie was always writing. Her first poem was published in Spare Rib magazine in 1979 and her first published short stories were in the anthology Sleeping Rough (1991), under the pen name Andie Hawthorn.
My mother was always drawn to fairytales and the forest. In 1991, our family moved to Forest Row, East Sussex. Andie spent many years teaching creative writing to adults and co-hosting the annual residential event Poetry Otherwise at Emerson College in Forest Row, inspiring many students along the way. She joined writing and book groups, read her poetry widely and won prizes. Her poems appeared in numerous magazines and journals. She also wrote a regular blog, Reading the Signs, about the creative process and life with chronic illness.
Andie was born in London, to Renee Goddard and Michael Mellinger, who had both arrived in Britain as child refugees from Nazi Germany, and both of whom were actors. She grew up in Primrose Hill, spending two years in Berlin as a young child, where she learned German. She attended 10 different schools and was expelled at least twice, before going on to study English literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, as a mature student, graduating in 1987.
In 1981, she had met Mark Lewenstein, and in 1985 they moved to the house in Hackney, east London, where my brother, Woody, and I first lived. It was around this time that Andie was diagnosed with ME.
Andie and Mark married in 1993 and, after nearly a quarter of a century in Forest Row, moved to Brighton in 2015, and then to Hove – Andie loved the sea almost as much as she loved the forest. While there, she published House of Bread (2020), a collection of her poems.
More recently, my parents moved to Enfield, north London, to be nearer to family. A few months before she died, Andie finished writing a novel, Key of the Kingdom, which drew on her experiences as a child.
What she achieved despite ME is extraordinary. In her blog, she described it as having “to move, as it were, to another country, the land of a particular kind of chronic illness – to learn its ways and find my way around”.
She is survived by Mark, Woody and me, her stepson, Jack, sister, Leonie, half-siblings, Corin, Paul, Katrin and Joel, and grandchildren, Archie, Poppy, Ezra, Felix and Raphael.
