A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications) by Marlon James was named as the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction today.
The Man Booker Prize was launched in 1969, and aims to promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written in English and published in the United Kingdom. Winners receive a prize of £50,000.
From the Man Booker Prize website:
The 44-year-old, now resident in Minneapolis, is the first Jamaican author to win the prize in its 47-year history.
A Brief History of Seven Killings is a 686-page 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. Of the book, the New York Times said: “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.”
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).
In addition to this year’s winner, the 2015 shortlist included:
Tom McCarthy (UK) Satin Island (Jonathan Cape)
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) The Fishermen (ONE, Pushkin Press)
Sunjeev Sahota (UK) The Year of the Runaways (Picador)
Anne Tyler (US) A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus)
Hanya Yanagihara (US) A Little Life (Picador)
