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

If 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.

Yet among the lines of young readers at the North Texas Teen Book Festival, their arms cradling impractical numbers of books, and the row of authors signing on an industrial scale, one woman stands out. Angie Thomas, one of the youngest writers in the place, is one black face in a sea of white. She's upbeat, her hair tied with a perky bow, and when a fan says she looks "so pretty" in a top that combines a hood with sheer lace panels, she laughs and says "thank you" in a Mississippi accent whose vowels are so many notes, it's a beguiling song. She fingers the garment. "My friend called it Thug Life with a feminine twist."