Dickens disciple Marlon James wins Booker Prize for Jamaica

Marlon James has received the £50,000 ($105,000) Man Booker prize for his fourth novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings.

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 13: Marlon James author of "A Brief History of Seven Killings" poses for photographers after winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2015 at The Guildhall on October 13, 2015 in London, England. (Photo by Neil Hall - WPA Pool /Getty Images)

The chief judge said he would not recommend the book to his mother because of its violence and swearing, while the author admitted its style and structure broke the rules he imposed on his creative writing students. He also revealed he almost quit writing a decade ago, convinced “clearly I am not meant to write books’’. Such is the uncommon stew that has produced Jamaica's first winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Marlon James, 44, and now resident in Minneapolis, received the £50,000 ($105,000) prize for his fourth novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which takes as its departure point the attempted assassination of reggae star Bob Marley at his Kingston mansion in 1976, during a period of political upheaval in the Caribbean nation that claimed more than 800 lives.

As befits the background to its creation, James’s 700-page novel is a complex, seething work that sprawls across three decades, taking in the Jamaican ganglands, political world and music scene, the intervention of the CIA and the rise of drug gangs in the US. The voices of its more than 75 characters range, as chief judge Michael Wood put it, from “the patois of the street posse to The Book of Revelation’’.

“It is a crime novel that moves beyond the world of crime and takes us deep into a recent history we know far too little about,’’ Wood said. “It moves at a terrific pace and will come to be seen as a classic of our times.’’ No surprise, then, that American cable network HBO plans to adapt the novel into a television drama.

James, his long hair half-tamed into a mane-like ponytail, accepted the award from Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, at a black-tie dinner at London’s Guildhall. His first response was not untypical of Booker winners: “Oh my god, oh wow,’’ he said, adding his assessment of his ­chances meant he had not prepared a speech. “It is so surreal I think I am going to wake up, or fall into a barrage of tears.’’

But he collected himself and delivered an intelligent and warm acceptance speech in which he dedicated the award to his late father, who did not read fiction but instilled in his son a love of Shakespeare. He said Marley and other reggae stars were an inspiration because “they were the first to recognise that the voice coming out of our mouths was a legitimate voice for fiction, for poetry … that the voice of the washerwoman could be poetry’’.

James described his upbringing as “British, Dickensian” and acknowledged a debt to the great novelist. ‘‘I still consider myself a Dickensian,’’ he said in one interview, “in as much as there are aspects of storytelling I still believe in: plot, surprise, cliffhangers.’’

This was the third year of the Booker being open to all novelists writing in English, a change that prompted fears of American domination. But once again, the American shortlistees — in this case Anne Tyler for A Spool of Blue Thread and, the bookies’ favourite, Hanya Yanagihara for A Little Life — did not win over the judges. The three other shortlistees were two Britons, Tom McCarthy for Satin Island and Sunjeev Sahota for The Year of the Runaways, and Nigerian Chigozie Obioma for his debut novel, The Fishermen.