Marlon James

Marlon James, the gay Jamaican author who won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, talks to Ben Kelly about homophobia, immigrant integration, and the need for greater diversity in literature

WORDS: BEN KELLY

“I think we need new myths and new worlds of wonder...

THE MAN BEHIND THE BOOKER

...It’s time to look at places other than Europe”

If you ever need an example of perseverance paying off, just look to Marlon James. His debut novel John Crow’s Devil was rejected 78 times before finally being published in 2005. Ten years later, in 2015, his third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, won the Man Booker Prize – one of the most distinguished honours in literature.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a sprawling epic which explores the social fabric of Jamaica in the 1970s and 1980s, and lays bare the human experience borne of poverty, drug addiction, gang warfare and political corruption. Taking the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley as his starting point, James weaves a web of characters who were involved, and pulls out the threads of their own stories in the years that followed.

“There’s a version of this story that’s not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come, and that might actually provide a bigger picture,” writes one character, a Rolling Stone journalist sent to Kingston to interview Marley. Indeed every character gets their say on ‘the Singer’ except for the man himself, whose point of view is absent from the novel.

This type of character study sits up there with classic endeavours by Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse, or Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It makes for a challenging read, but James was praised by the Booker judges for adopting the voices of over 75 characters, ranging “from Jamaican slang to Biblical heights.”