As I go through my life I will always write the things that I’m trying to make sense of That’s it.” Also set in south London, People Person is about a non-nuclear family coming together rather than falling apart, but again touches on contemporary issues such as social media, revenge porn and distrust of the police. “It’s time to write something that is just about Black people. “Queenie was so much about Blackness in response to whiteness, I’ve said what I needed to say about that,” she says. I have to write it all down,’” the author, now 33, says when we meet to talk about her much-anticipated second novel, People Person. “Queenie was this big burst of 25-year-old energy: ‘I am sick of sexism and going on bad dates and hearing all this shit, and my friends having to go through all this shit, and going through shit at work. Critics praised its combination of empathy, wit and political awareness some readers recognised themselves in fiction for the first time. Written when she was in her early 20s, and landing in the midst of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, Queenie couldn’t have been more timely. Toni Morrison’s famous injunction to write the book you want to read might have been conceived with a future Carty-Williams in mind.
#RAW BLACK GAY SEX PORN SERIES#
The novel has sold more than half a million copies and is being made into a TV drama on Channel 4.īut where Bridget Jones’s Diary now seems dated in terms of sexual politics, Queenie is often deeply shocking in its depiction of the heroine’s treatment at the hands of a series of toxic men, taking in internet dating, mental health problems and the housing crisis, as well as everything else that goes with being a young woman.
Today, her name rarely appears without the words “publishing phenomenon” attached: Queenie won book of the year at the British book awards in 2020 (Bridget Jones took it in 1998), making Carty-Williams the first Black writer ever to get the prize, an indictment of the industry in itself. (She wasn’t working in marketing for a publishing house at the time for nothing.) She wanted her novel, which follows the misadventures of millennial south London journalist Queenie, to reach as wide a readership as possible. I t was Candice Carty-Williams who came up with the “Black Bridget Jones” tagline for her debut novel, Queenie.