The contest for the Booker, which was first awarded in 1969, grew more heated a year ago, when the prize was opened up to any novel written in English and published in Britain.
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A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictional account of an assignation attempt of Bob Marley’s life in 1976.
“Jamaicans were jubilant on Tuesday as news broke that one of their own, novelist Marlon James won the prestigious Man Booker Prize”. Last year’s victor, Australian writer Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, has sold 800,000 copies worldwide, a statement announcing the prize results said.
In that sense, we claim Andrea Levy, first post Wind Rush, UK-born writer of Jamaican parents, who was short-listed for the Booker in 2010 for her novel, Long Song, for which she won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction in 2011.
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.
We note these facts not to detract from Marlon James’ accomplishment, but to acknowledge the universality of the Jamaican voice in its variegated forms.
“A Brief History of Seven Killings” is James’ third book.
“There was a time I actually thought I was writing the kind of stories people didn’t want to read”, said James in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Indeed, though he was shaped by Jamaica, in Jamaica, Mr James now lives in the United States, an experience that will adjust the lenses through which he observes the world and, perhaps, the nuance of a few future novel.
“It was very important to me that there were gay characters in the book – to reflect the gayness and hypocrisy in Jamaica”.
“There’s this whole universe of spunky creativity that’s happening”, he said.
Asked about how it felt to be the first Jamaican to take the prize, James said he hoped the win would draw attention to more talented writers from the Caribbean. “I actually destroyed the manuscript, I even went on my friends computers and erased it”, he said on whether he ever considered giving up writing because of the multiple times his novel got rejected.
Also shortlisted were Briton Sunjeev Sahota’s “The Year of the Runaways”, “The Fishermen” by Nigeria’s Chigozie Obioma, American author Anne Tyler’s “A Spool of Blue Thread” and British writer Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island”.
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“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.
