Journalism of Courage
In September 2015, when an officer in the Oakland police department in the US died by suicide, his death note would blow the lid off a sexual-abuse scandal involving several members of the police and a Richmond-based sex worker who had been underage for a period of time during these encounters. Subsequent investigations would find more members of law enforcement agencies across the Bay Area culpable. The case would eventually be settled in 2017 when Oakland city would pay the woman, then 19, $1 million in compensation but with no admission of liability.
Leila Mottley was 14 at the time when the investigations began in 2016, a Black girl growing up in Oakland. She had followed the case with great interest, especially the plight of the young woman, which seemed to go unnoticed in the hoopla around the investigations into the police forces. It would be the basis of her first novel, ‘Nightcrawling’, published last month, that has now put the 20-year-old on the Booker long list announced on Tuesday. Mottley is the youngest ever writer to make it to the Booker long list. Before her, British novelist Jon McGregor held the honour when he was long-listed for his debut work, ‘If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things’, in 2002. The youngest winner of the £50,000 Booker Prize is Eleanor Catton, who won the Prize in 2013 for ‘The Luminaries’. The author from New Zealand was 28 at the time.
Mottley’s rise
Mottley, who is currently on a book tour around California, began her novel in high school, finishing it when she was 17. The New York Times reports that it was during her time at Smith College in Massachusetts’s Northampton that she approached her professor, this year’s Women’s Prize-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki, for advice. Ozeki directed her to Lucy Carson and Molly Friedrich of the New York-based boutique literary agency, Friedrich Agency, who sold the book in a 13-way auction to publisher Knopf during the pandemic, in time for Mottley’s 18th birthday.
Her debut novel may have come out at the age of 20, but Mottley’s precocious talent has shown since her childhood. In several interviews, Mottley has mentioned how she had gravitated towards literature early on in her life, influenced by her father, a playwright. After finishing as runner-up for two consecutive years, she became the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate in 2018 at the age of 16. By then, she was already a familiar face in California’s literary scene, with published works in prominent magazines and extensive live performances in slam-poetry sessions. The publication of the novel in June saw it rapidly making headway on bestseller lists. Its selection as Oprah Winfrey’s book club pick for the month brought it further attention. The American talk-show host praised the book’s deep lyricism and rendition of a “soul-searching portrait of survival and hope”.Mottley, who counts among her influences Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Jacqueline Woodson and Jesmyn Ward, is reportedly working on a debut poetry collection, as well.
What Mottley’s ‘Nightcrawling’ is about
A sweeping portrait of exploitation bred by the convergence of poverty, race, power and misogyny, ‘Nightcrawling’ is the story of 17-year-old Kiara Johnson and her hard-scrabble life of hustle. As Kiara ends up as a juvenile sex worker, trying to earn enough to get by and to keep safe her nine-year-old neighbour abandoned by his mother, she lands up in a cycle of abuse perpetrated by the very system designed to keep people safe. In luminous prose, Mottley traces Kiara’s fractured relationship with her own brother Marcus, the systemic violence she endures, and her core of resilience that refuses to bend down to oppression.
In her author’s note, Mottley mentions how the novel takes off from the Oakland scandal, which made her aware of the invisibility of survivors if they were people of colour. Coming on the heels of the Black Lives Matter movement and a greater awareness of the institutional racism faced by African Americans in the US, Mottley’s depiction is particularly poignant in its observation of the abandonment experienced by Black women and women of colour, especially if they are social outliers.
The 2022 Booker longlist
This year’s Booker’s dozen, selected out of 169 entries by a five-member jury led by British art historian Neil MacGregor, has many firsts to its credit. At the other end of the spectrum from Mottley, English writer Alan Garner, who turns 88 in October, is the oldest author to be long-listed for his ‘Treacle Walker’. The list also features two other debuts — ‘Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies’ by Maddie Mortimer and ‘After Sappho by Selby’ Wynn Schwartz. At 116 pages, Claire Keegan’s ‘Small Things Like These’ is the shortest book to win a nomination. ‘Offshore’ by Penelope Fitzgerald, at 132 pages, was the shortest to win the award in 1979.
The six-book shortlist will be announced on September 6 in London. The winner will be announced on October 17 at London’s performing-arts venue, Roundhouse, in a first in-person ceremony since the pandemic. The 2021 Booker Prize for Fiction was won by South African writer Damon Galgut for ‘The Promise’.
