Stories That Couldn't Wait for Childhood to End
In a house in Liverpool, England, a five-year-old girl named Destiny Likambi had a story she needed to tell. It was about a girl on a journey — one of those stories that seems simple until you notice it isn't, the way children's literature can carry genuine emotional weight if the author is paying attention. Destiny was paying attention. Her parents, members of a Cameroonian family settled in Merseyside, saw their daughter's compulsive storytelling not as something to manage but as something to support. They helped her shape the story into a manuscript, and they found a way to publish it. The Girl on the Journey appeared in 2021, when Destiny was five years old, and within days it was an Amazon number one bestseller.
The speed of the public response surprised everyone. In an age saturated with content, a book by a five-year-old that was genuinely readable — that told a story with purpose and delivered it with the directness that only children and very experienced writers tend to achieve — cut through the noise. ITV News Granada ran a feature. The local press in Merseyside covered it. Online, the story spread with the particular warmth that stories about children creating rather than merely consuming tend to generate.
Destiny did not stop. The second book followed, and the third and fourth. They arrived with the speed of someone who had a backlog of stories already formed and simply needed to get them down. Destiny and the Troll, The Naughty Destiny, The Snow Sisters — each landed on Amazon bestseller lists in their categories. By the time Destiny was six, she had four published books and a global reputation in children's literacy circles as the world's youngest author to publish multiple books — a distinction her family's publishing house, Likambi Global Publishing, was careful to document and promote.
"An author needs to have a wide imagination. But I think anyone can write a book if they really want to." — Destiny Likambi, age 6
The Likambi family's story has a remarkable collective dimension. Destiny is the youngest of three siblings who are all published authors. Her older brother Caleb, twelve at the time of his debut, published his first children's book through the same family publishing house. The family has built what amounts to a small literary enterprise from Liverpool, with a mother — Dr. Sylvia Likambi — whose own academic credentials lend the enterprise a formidable organizational backbone. Destiny and her siblings have spoken at the House of Commons at a virtual event, conducted Black History Month book tours at local schools, and appeared on multiple television platforms.
In 2023, at age seven, Destiny published two more books: Chicky and the Forest and The Summer Holiday. She spoke at the press event with the polished composure of someone who had been doing this for years — which, relative to her lifespan, she had. By the time she reached her eighth birthday in 2024, she had nine books in print and a publishing record that made established children's authors blink twice when they checked the dates.
"I want to show children from Liverpool, children who look like me, that you can write the stories you want to read." — Destiny Likambi
The BBC UK Black show hosted a segment with the Likambi children authors — three kids from a Cameroonian-British family, all telling stories from their own perspective, all finding audiences. Destiny has become, in the ecosystem of diverse children's literature, a figure of genuine significance: proof that representation in books can be created by children themselves, not just written for them by sympathetic adults. She is, as of 2025, nine years old and presumably still writing.