When most people are 19 they are still trying to shake off the remains of teenage awkwardness, not publishing novels that go on to be , such as Leila Mottley did.
The US writer, who turned 20 last month, is the youngest person to be nominated for the award for her novel Nightcrawling. This year she joins Alan Garner, 87, who is the oldest person to get a nomination.
The 2022 Booker longlist is notable for its diversity. Among the authors are Sri-Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka for his book The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo for her novel Glory, and Argentinian-born Hernan Diaz for his novel Trust.
In any other year 26-year-old Maddie Mortimer would likely have been the youngest on the longlist for her debut Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies. But all eyes are on Mottley, whose debut also made her the youngest-ever novelist to make Oprah’s Book Club pick – which pretty much .
The novel was inspired by a 2016 true story that involved a number of police officers being suspended in Oakland, California for the sexual exploitation of a young sex worker and then attempting to cover it up.
As Mottley tells : “I was a young teenager and it was a formative time for me. I remember paying a lot of attention to it, and noticing how the media disproportionately focused on the impact on the police department, and on what it would mean for the relationship between the police and the community. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, what about this young girl? What about the thousands of other survivors that don’t ever have their stories told in the media, or make it to a courtroom?”
It didn’t take the publishing industry long to recognise the resulting novel was hot property. There was a fierce for the US rights and a nine-way auction in the UK. It has also been sold into eight languages.
As journalist Claire Armistead notes in The Guardian, “It’s such an assured novel that I find myself checking Mottley’s age twice.”
Mottley herself doesn’t think she is particularly precocious.
“I’ve never felt I’m more talented than the average teenager, but I guess that depends on the teenagers you know. I was surrounded by a bunch of really, really talented young people. And so I definitely never felt that special,” she tells The Guardian.
But despite denying being gifted, there that she certainly is. Mottley graduated high school at 16, the same year she was named Oakland youth poet laureate, she had written two unpublished manuscripts before she embarked on this novel that she started writing before she turned 17.
Along with writing books, poetry is something that appears to be Mottley’s first love. As she , “Poetry is really important to me. I think it was the first time I shared my work with anyone. Going in front of audiences and performing these poems and getting to feel this direct connection and feedback, knowing whether it is resonating or not, as you're speaking, that was always really special to me.”
However most important of all for Mottley is telling the stories of young Black women. As she tells Harper’s Bazaar, “I also wanted to explore the ways that young Black girls are expected to do a lot more than we should be, and how that that inevitably ages you. There is this inability to develop as your own individualised person, if you're always carrying the weight of others.”
As for what she does next, Mottley has deferred her university studies due to the publication of her book but there is no doubt whatever she goes on to do, the future looks bright for this very young Booker-nominated author.
