A few minutes into my chat with Candice Carty-Williams, she receives a text message. “It’s Emerald Fennell,” she says, stealing a glance at her phone and smiling. “She’s one of the new friends that I’ve made.”
Of course Carty-Williams’s friendship circle has expanded to include Oscar-winning writers. Since the 2019 publication of her debut novel, Queenie, the 34-year-old has become one of Britain’s buzziest new authors. The story of Queenie Jenkins, a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman who seeks comfort in all the wrong places following a messy breakup with her long-term, white boyfriend, was an overnight phenomenon. It won book of the year at the British Book awards (making Carty-Williams the first Black author to do so), while reviewers praised it as both a “smart and breezy comic debut” and “astutely political”. Writing in Time magazine, Afua Hirsch said Carty-Williams had “taken a black woman’s story and made it a story of the age”.
