Man Booker Prize 2015: Marlon James wins for History of Seven Killings

Marlon James’ retelling of the attempted assassination of reggae singer Bob Marley has won the Man Booker Prize.

Author Marlon James wins the Man Booker Prize for his book A Brief History of Seven Killings in London.

Jamaican author Marlon James has made Man Booker Prize history by becoming the first writer from the Caribbean nation to win the world’s most celebrated literary prize.

James, 45, was this morning named the winner of the $105,000 prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, which takes as its starting point the attempted assassination of reggae singer Bob Marley in 1976.

“Oh my God, oh wow. This is surreal. I think I am going to wake up or fall into a barrage of tears,’’ James, his long hair gathered in a mane-like ponytail, said after accepting the prize from Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall at the black tie Booker ceremony in London.

James revealed he almost abandoned writing a decade ago after a manuscript he had written was rejected 70 times. “Clearly I am not going to write book,’’ he recalled of that time. He deleted the manuscript, but later was able to retrieve it and it was published by Kaylie Jones, daughter of from Here to Eternity author James Jones.

James dedicated the award to his later father, who although not a fiction reader, instilled in his son a love of Shakespeare. He remembered having “soliloquy battles” with his father in “Jamaican rum bars”.

James said he was inspired by Marley and other reggae stars 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.’’

Once again, the American novels short-listed for the prize, Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was the bookies’ favourite, failed to win over the judges. The three other short-listed novels were The Fisherman by Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma and two by British writers, The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota and Satin Island by Tom McCarthy.

The chair of the judging panel, English author and academic Michael Wood, said while A Brief History of Seven Killings, which explores Jamaican politics and gangland life over three decades, is “the most exciting book” on the shortlist, a work populated by more than 75 characters that went from “Jamaican slang to Biblical heights”.

Read James Bradley’s review of A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James here.