Aye Write! Over 800,000 people may have read Andrea Levy's Small Island but on the opening night of Glasgow's literary festival, a few hundred of us got to meet the woman in person, writes Lesley McDowell.

Over 800,000 people may have read Andrea Levy's Small Island but on the opening night of Glasgow's literary festival, a few hundred of us got to meet the woman in person, writes Lesley McDowell.

Writers aren't always the best readers of their work but Levy is magnificent - it's the "listen to me" urgency in her voice. Levy won the Orange Prize Best of the Best, partly for this quality in her writing - she has a story to tell, a great story, it has to be heard, and right now.

Between extracts, she spoke of her mother's embarrassment that her daughter should use her story of arriving in England from Jamaica after the war (until Levy got to meet the Queen and then it was all right), and made us laugh with her short-lived membership of a book group (she wanted to catch up on the serious literature she'd missed out on, not always a popular choice). She rejoiced too that "it used to be black people who write for a black audience", whereas now that market has opened up. Asked by chair Karen Cunningham what she thought of British citizenship tests, Levy was diplomatic. They're a great idea, she said, "as long as they're a way of welcoming people to this country, and not used as a stick to beat people with."

This marvellous opening evening was rounded off by the great triumvirate (if Liz Lochhead will excuse me calling her a "vir") of Lochhead (reading some entirely new and inspiring work, written in the last two years), Tom Leonard (angry and unrepentant as ever, mixing family and politics in Being a Human Being with the shock of the memoir Remembrance Day) and, always a great favourite, William McIlvanney.

Lochhead's range continues to astonish - amused at repeatedly being pitched as a "woman's writer" she decided to entertain us with some Poems about Men instead, and it was interesting to see what men caught her eye.

There was a tribute to "those great heroes of mine", songwriters Ira and George Gershwin in First, the Phone Call. She told the ballad of the New Married Miner based on a figure Lochhead would watch from her parents' first-owned home, coming home from the mines still covered in coal dust. She made us laugh with the Man in the Comic Strip (I don't think it was as good fun for the man in the comic strip as it was for his readers) and moved us with the "mascot" for funerals, The Baker.