Marlon James’ Bob Marley novel wins 2015 Man Booker Prize

Marlon James, a Jamaican was announced winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize recently for his novel, ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings,’ a fictional account of an attempt to take Bob Marley’s life. “I was so convinced I wasn’t going to win I didn’t write a speech,” James said when he reached the podium. […]

Marlon James, a Jamaican was announced winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize recently for his novel, ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings,’ a fictional account of an attempt to take Bob Marley’s life.
“I was so convinced I wasn’t going to win I didn’t write a speech,” James said when he reached the podium. He also said he just met Ben Okri, and it hit him that “the Man Booker Prize is that award you hear about that suddenly increases your library by 13 books.”
The author dedicated his win to his late father and said he hoped what has happened to him would bring more attention to Caribbean writing. 
James, 44, is the first Jamaican to win the prize for a story described as epic and uncompromising with shocking violence, swearing, graphic sex, drug crime and humour.
In the post-award ceremony, James took the opportunity to denounce the use of adverbs in fiction. He explained that “my jeremiad about adverbs begins here. It’s funny that they are called modifiers, because too often instead of making a sentence clearer they make it more vague. ‘The big muscular horse ran quickly’ will never be better than ‘the stallion galloped’. But we’ll run to ‘ran quickly’ and instead of making the sentence clearer it muddies it.”
James is Associate Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, USA. Among the finalists for the prize this year was Nigeria’s Chigozie Obioma, author of ‘The Fishermen.’
‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’ was among more than a dozen winners of the 36th annual American Book Awards that celebrate diversity and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction and a Minnesota Book Award. James’ previous novel ‘The Book of Night Women’ won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His debut novel, ‘John Crow’s Devil’, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.