Who Is Leila Mottley? 20-Year-Old Author Becomes Youngest Nominee For Booker Prize 2022

The longlist of 13 books from various backgrounds that the Booker Prize hopes to award this year has been published. Six American authors have been nominated out of the total 13. The American nominations include Trust by Hernan Diaz, The Trees by Percival Everett, Booth by Karen Joy Fowler, After Shoppy by Selby Wynn Schwartz, Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout, and Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley.

Other authors from other countries have also made the list with them. The jury also nominated NoViolet Bulawayo, Percival Everett, Shahan Karunatilaka, Claire Keegan, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Maddie Mortimer, and Selby Lynn Schwartz as authors. $60,000 has been announced as the prize money.

Who is Leila Mottley?

The Booker Prize nomination list's youngest nominee, Mottley, is only 20 years old. She is the author of the novel Nightcrawling. Oakland, California, is reportedly the setting for Mottley's story as well. She was born and raised there. She comes from a creative family; her father Nick Mottley is a playwright. She is one of the three debut novelists on the list. For their works Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies and After Sappho, respectively, American novelist Selby Wynn Schwartz and British author Maddie Mortimer are among the other nominees.

Leila Mottley, who has been writing and reading since she was a little child, was elected Oakland's juvenile poet laureate in 2018 when she was 16 years old. She listed Sula by Toni Morrison, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, books by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, and National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward as some of her all-time favourite books.

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Mottley lists Gorilla, My Love by the late, significant Toni Cade Bambara as another essential. She also mentions Their Eyes Were Watching God, the American classic by Zora Neale Hurston, which Alice Walker popularised. Taking to Instagram, she writes, "Really truly honoured to share that Nightcrawling has been long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, alongside two other debuts and two authors represented by the Friedrich Agency!"