ALEXANDRA ALTER and KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA | NEW YORK TIMES | OCTOBER 2015
The Jamaican novelist Marlon James won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” a raw, violent epic that uses the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 to explore Jamaican politics, gang wars and drug trafficking. Mr. James is the first Jamaican-born author to win the Man Booker, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. At a ceremony at London’s Guildhall, Mr. James said he was so certain that he would not win that he did not prepare an acceptance speech.
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“I’m not an easy writer to like,” he said, referring to his experimental style.
The Booker judges praised Mr. James’s stylistic range and his unflinching exploration of violence, cronyism and corruption.
“It’s a crime novel that moves beyond the world of crime and takes us deep into a recent history we know far too little about,” Michael Wood, the chair of the Booker judges, said when awarding the prize. >>READ MORE
