Marlon James wins Man Booker Prize
Author Marlon James became the first Jamaican to win the Man Booker Prize 2015 for his 686-page book 'A Brief History of Seven killings' based on a fictional history of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976. Judges called it a classic and a crime novel that moves at a terrific pace. The prize was awarded to him by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.
The Man Booker Prize for fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK. The Man booker prize was first awarded in the year 1969. It is also a mark of distinction for authors to be selected for inclusion in the shortlist or even to be nominated for the "longlist".
The awarded prize money was originally £21,000 but was later raised to £50,000 in 2002 under the sponsorship of the Man Group, making it one of the world's richest literary prizes.
Carmen Callil, chair of the 1996 Booker judges called Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things' an awful book and said it shouldn't have won in 1997. A. L. Kennedy, who was a judge in 1996, called the prize "a pile of crooked nonsense". Irvine Welsh's critically acclaimed novel 'Trainspotting' was pulled from the shortlist to satisy two judges who threatened to walk out.
Salman Rushdie's novel 'Midnight's children' was chosen as the "the best novel out of all times" and was awarded the Booker of Bookers Prize in 1993 on the 25th anniversary of the prize.
Apart from Marlon James' A brief history of Seven Killings, Tom McCarthy's Satin Island was the top runner which offers a master class in brevity and wit. Other nominees were Chigozie Obioma's 'The Fisherman', Indian-born Sunjeev Sahota's 'The year of the runaways', Anne Taylor's funny novel 'A spool of blue thread' and last but not the least, Hanya Yanagihara's psycho-sexual thriller 'A little life'.
Marlon James had almost abandoned writing after his first novel 'John Crow's Devil' was rejected nearly 80 times by publishers. James thought people were not interested in the kind of stories he wrote. He almost gave up and destroyed the manuscript of the novel and had to retrieve it by searching in the email outbox of an old iMac computer.
