Marlon James wins 2015 Man Booker Prize

Marlon James became the first Jamaican to win the Man Booker fiction prize on Tuesday for A Brief History of Seven Killings, inspired by an attempt to kill reggae star Bob Marley, and said he hoped more Caribbean writers will follow.

Awarded for the best literary novel written in English, James is the first Jamaican to win the annual prize.

James was awarded the $77,000 prize during a black-tie dinner at London’s medieval Guildhall. Michael Wood, chairman of the judging panel, said “A Brief History of Seven Killings” was “the most exciting book on the list” and a novel full of the “sheer pleasure” of language. He took a writing workshop in Kingston and later enrolled in a writing programme at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

In a previous interview with the New York Times, James revealed that he had to flee his homeland because he feared persecution as a gay man. “Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica”, he said back in March.

Instead, the novel received glowing reviews.

The New York Times described the book as “like a Tarantino remake of “The Harder They Come” but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner…epic in every sense of that word”.

The writer, who now lives in Minneapolis in the United States, called the work “a novel of exile” and said he needed the perspective and distance to be able to write “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, his third novel. “We don’t want to talk about the history, we don’t want to talk about the corruption, we don’t even want to talk about homosexuality”, he said.

“It was very important to me that there were gay characters in the book – to reflect the gayness and hypocrisy in Jamaica”.

James was considered something of a long shot among this year’s nominees, which included a geographically and stylistically diverse group of writers from around the world.

The other finalists were British writer Sunjeev Sahota’s immigrants’ story “The Year of the Runaways”; the fratricide fable “The Fishermen”, by Nigeria’s Chigozie Obioma; and British writer Tom McCarthy’s digital drama “Satin Island”.

James said he hoped the award would draw attention to the flourishing literary scene in his home country. I do not think I will be because there is this real universe of spunky creativity that is happening. “But he said the change had broadened the types of books under consideration”.