Winner hopes Booker will spotlight Caribbean
LONDON Marlon James, the first Jamaican writer to win the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction, hopes it will help raise the profile of a vibrant literary scene.
He hopes for “more attention to what’s coming out of Jamaica and the Caribbean, because I think there are some brand- new voices coming out who are exploring contemporary society, who are exploring what’s beyond politics, what’s beyond colonialism.”
James won the prize of nearly $ 100,000 for a vivid, violent, exuberant and expletive- laden novel based on the attempted assassination of Bob Marley. Michael Wood, head of the judging panel, said A Brief History of Seven Killings was “the most exciting book on the list” and is a novel full of the “sheer pleasure” of language.
It is “very exciting, very violent, full of swearing,” Wood said. “It was a book we didn’t actually have any difficulty deciding on — it was a unanimous decision, a little bit to our surprise.”
Judges awarded the prize Tuesday at a black- tie dinner at London’s medieval Guildhall. The 44- yearold author said he almost gave up writing more than a decade ago when his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected by 70 publishers. He said winning the Booker Prize was “surreal,” and joked he would spend the prize money on a tailor- made suit or “every William Faulkner novel in hardcover.”
A Brief History of Seven Killings charts political violence in
Jamaica and the spread of crack cocaine in the U. S., and hinges on a 1976 attempt on the life of reggae superstar Marley — identified in the book only as “The Singer.” The story is told in a cacophony of voices — from gangsters to ghosts, drug dealers to CIA agents — and in dialects ranging from U. S. English to Jamaican patois.
James, who teaches creative writing at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., said he saw the book as “a novel of exile.”
He said distance from Jamaica had given him “a certain courage to go into topics like violence and the aftermath of violence and sexuality. “I think I needed that distance and I needed that perspective.”
Critics have compared the novel to the stream- of- consciousness novels of William Faulkner and the hyper- violent movies of Quentin Tarantino, while James has cited Charles Dickens as an influence on his multi- character depiction of society.
Wood acknowledged that the book’s plentiful sex, violence and swearing might put off buyers who “like to give the Booker winners to their mother to read.”