BREAKINGIN

Debut authors: How they did it, what they learned, and why you can do it, too.

- MORIAH RICHARD

Ishi Robinson Sweetness in the Skin (Literary fiction, April, Harper-Collins)

“Sweetness in the Skin is about a Jamaican girl named Pumkin, struggling with her identity and trying to find her place in the world, who is determined to bake her way into the opportunity of a lifetime.”

WRITES FROM: Berlin. PRE

SWEETNESS: I started off writing short stories as a child, a couple of which got published, then as a teenager, I wrote a weekly opinion column on teenage life in Kingston, Jamaica, for the national newspaper. In Rome, I wrote a weekly opinion column on life as an expat for a now-defunct e-zine. I got back into fiction writing in Berlin: I wrote short stories, a number of which were published in online magazines and one in an anthology.

TIME FRAME: I started writing it in the month of my 40th birthday, which is significant for me because I just don’t think I could have written this book when I was younger. I started out with NaNoWriMo and finished it in about two years, although I took a few months off writing during the pandemic.

ENTER THE AGENT: I’ve been a member of a writing organization, Th e Reader Berlin, for about a decade. The founder, Victoria Gosling (a fantastic author!), read my draft and asked me if she could send it to my now agent, Jenny Hewson from Lutyens & Rubinstein, because she thought it was right up her alley.

BIGGEST SURPRISE: Hilariously, when I got my book deals in September, I thought the book would be published by that same December, three months later. I was horrified to learn it would take almost two years!