Doing the write thing: Angie Thomas.
Photograph: Nina Robinson for the Observer

Angie Thomas: the debut novelist who turned racism and police violence into a bestseller

Angie Thomas grew up witnessing drug dealing and gun crime but dreamed of being a writer. Then police shot a young, unarmed black man and she found her subject. Afua Hirsch meets her


Afua Hirsch
Sun 26 Mar ‘17 08.00 BST

I

f a spaceship landed in northern Texas and beamed every adolescent within a 50-mile radius into its desolate interior, the scene would look a lot like what now lies in front of me. It’s difficult to believe there are any teenagers in north Texas not currently forming orderly queues at the Las Colinas conference centre – a formidably angular set of slabs in the Texan wasteland.