Perhaps most transformative of all in terms of the 30-year-old author’s profile, it’s the novel the super-influencer (and poster girl for a new breed of bookish supermodel) Emily Ratajkowski had her nose buried in while sunning herself in the Hamptons back in August. It saw Leilani declared a writer of “exhilarating freedom and daring” by Zadie Smith, a mentor and her professor on the MFA programme at New York University. Released in the US over the summer and hitting UK shelves next month, Luster, which follows the sexual entanglements of twenty-something New Yorker Edie, is already in the running for a string of literary prizes. It took a little over a year to write, but I worked on it in a number of workshops. But though her typical millennial experiences – Leilani lives in Brooklyn and worked as a Postmates delivery girl as an aspiring writer fresh out of college – helped to inform her debut novel, the buzz the book is generating means the author herself is now anything but. Raven Leilani: It began during the second semester of my first year in NYU’s MFA program. Raven Leilani’s voice is bubbling over with enthusiasm when she answers the phone, despite a time difference that means our conversation is taking place at an hour the typical millennial might consider less than ideal.
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