Man Booker Prize for ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James has been named the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, speaks after being named the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2015. Marlon James became the first Jamaican to win this prestigious award. (Photo: AP)

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James was named the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction on Tuesday. James became the first Jamaican author to win the award in its 47-year history. The book has been published by Oneworld Publications. James Marlon is 44 years old and lives in Minneapolis.

686 pages long, A Brief History of Seven Killings is an epic with over 75 characters and voices. Set in Kingston, where James was born, the book is a fictional history of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976.

It’s like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come, but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner...epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex.
— New York Times

Referring to Bob Marley only as ‘The Singer’ throughout, A Brief History of Seven Killings retells this near mythic assassination attempt through the myriad voices – from witnesses and FBI and CIA agents to killers, ghosts, beauty queens and Keith Richards’ drug dealer – to create a rich, polyphonic study of violence, politics and the musical legacy of Kingston of the 1970s. James has credited Charles Dickens as one of his formative influences, saying ‘I still consider myself a Dickensian in as much as there are aspects of storytelling I still believe in – plot, surprise, cliffhangers’ (Interview Magazine).

The book cover of A Brief History of Seven Killings, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. (Courtesy: Penguin Randomhouse)

This is the first Man Booker Prize for independent publisher, Oneworld Publications.

This book is startling in its range of voices and registers, running from the patois of the street posse to The Book of Revelation. It is a representation of political times and places, from the CIA intervention in Jamaica to the early years of crack gangs in New York and Miami.
— Michael Wood, Chair of Judges

In addition to his £50,000 prize and trophy, James also receives a designer bound edition of his book and a further £2,500 for being shortlisted.

This is the second year that the prize, first awarded in 1969, has been open to writers of any nationality, writing originally in English and published in the UK. Previously, the prize was open only to authors from the UK & Commonwealth, Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe.

Read the full story here.