Jamaican novelist Marlon James wins 2015 Man Booker Prize

According to themanbookprize.com, there were 156 novels considered for the prize this year “then 13, then six and now, at last, just the one – Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings”.

Marlon James, the Jamaican novelist, has won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction for “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, his fictional retelling of the 1976 attempted murder of Bob Marley.

The prize, which in its 47-year history has gone to Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood and J.M. Coetzee, carries a top cash award of £50,000 (S$106,100), but more importantly, can be a huge shot in the arm for book sales.

The book has been described by the judges as being “very violent, very exciting” and “full of swearing”, but still garnered a unanimous vote of approval despite all that.

We note these facts not to detract from Marlon James’ accomplishment, but to acknowledge the universality of the Jamaican voice in its variegated forms.

James spent four years working on A Brief History Of Seven Killings. “I hope I’m not the last and I don’t think I will be”, James said. James, who teaches creative writing at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, said he saw the book as “a novel of exile.”He said distance from Jamaica had given him “a certain courage to go into topics like violence and the aftermath of violence and sexuality….

Critics have compared the novel to the stream-of-consciousness novels of William Faulkner and the hyper-violent movies of Quentin Tarantino, while James has cited Charles Dickens as an influence on his multi-character depiction of society. “But he said the change had broadened the types of books under consideration”. The same novel also won her the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2005, and award that has also been received by Jamaican poet, Lorna Goodison. “Were I in Jamaica, I would not have written this novel”. The other finalists were British writer Sunjeev Sahotas immigrants story “The Year of the Runaways”; the fratricide fable “The Fishermen, ” by Nigerias Chigozie Obioma; and British writer Tom McCarthys digital drama “Satin Island.”This is the second year the prize has been open to English-language writers of all nationalities.

James said he hoped the award would draw attention to the flourishing literary scene in his home country. “I think there is a lot more that is coming”.

James, who said he had been inspired to become a writer by his father, said he had made a decision to give up writing after one of his books was rejected 70 times, but eventually it was published and he was able to put the voices he heard in Jamaica into his work.

“The reggae singers… were the first to recognise that the voice coming out of our mouths was a legitimate voice of fiction… that the son of the market woman can speak poetry”, he said.