Jamaican novelist Marlon James has won the Man Booker Prize for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings”. At a ceremony at London’s Guildhall, James said he was so certain that he would not win that he did not prepare an acceptance speech.
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James also authored “The Book of Night Women” and “John Crow’s Devil”, his first novel that, according to theguardian.com, was rejected by publishers 78 times.
“Jamaica has a really, really rich literary tradition. To save my older, cooler brother, I pretended we weren’t related”.
“There’s this whole universe of really spunky creativity that’s happening”, James said.
“This is the riskiest novel I’ve ever written not just in terms of subject matter but in terms of form”, he told journalists. “Funnily enough, Marley was a character in most of these stories and I didn’t even notice”, he said. “I hope it brings more attention to what’s coming out of Jamaica and the Caribbean”. “There are a few brand new voices coming out and we are exploring what is beyond politics, contemporary society and colonialism, comics, humour and I hope there is a greater lens turned towards that”. The book crosses over several decades and covers the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s.
“I kept running into dead ends with the stories until a friend of mine said, ‘Why do you think it’s one story?'” James said.
“Someone said to me they like to give Booker winners to their mother to read, but this might be a little hard”, he joked. “I thought it would be considered as one of those experimental novels that no one reads”, he said.
“I am going to give them ways in and I am going to give them voices they can listen to. A lot of it is very, very amusing and a lot of it is very human”.
The judges started off with 156 books before whittling it down to a shortlist of six finalists. Others in the running were Londoner Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island”, Nigeria-born Chigozie Obioma’s “The Fishermen”, Los Angeles author Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”, and Minnesota-born Anne Tyler’s “A Spool of Blue Thread”.
He said a rule change two years ago which allowed American writers to compete for the Man Booker, previously limited for the most part to the Commonwealth, had no impact on this year’s choice, since Jamaica is a Commonwealth country.
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Jonathan Ruppin, web editor of Foyles bookshops, described the victor as “a visceral and uncompromising novel that sheds a stark light on a profoundly disturbing chapter of Jamaica’s history”.
