Jamaican author, Marlon James has been named as the winner of the 2015 prestigious literary award, Man Booker Prize for Fiction with his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings”.

James is the first Jamaican writer to win the prestigious award and only the second Caribbean winner in the 47-year history of the prize, after VS Naipaul in 1971.

James is no stranger to book-lovers in Trinidad and Tobago as A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction in April and the author has twice headlined the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, T&T’s annual festival of words, stories, and ideas. The OCM Bocas Prize is open only to writers of Caribbean citizenship or birth and is sponsored by One Caribbean Media, parent company of Caribbean Communications Network (CCN) and Trinidad Express Newspapers.

A vivid and sprawling narrative told through a multiplicity of voices, A Brief History of Seven Killings gives a fictional account of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Kingston in 1976, and follows the lives of dozens of characters connected to “The Singer”.

James’s novel, his third, has won high praise from book reviewers around the world. The New York Times described A Brief History of Seven Killings as “epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over the top, colossal and dizzyingly complex”.

The Man Booker Prize, which comes with a cash award of £50,000, is one of the highest-profile literary awards in the Anglophone world, and winning books typically see a surge in sales.

culled from peregrinereads