2015 Booker Prize winner retells murder attempt on Bob Marley

Pan Macmillan India is distributing the newly crowned 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James in India. The novel has been published by Oneworld Publishing. Meanwhile, the 44-year-old author from Jamaica, now a resident of Minneapolis, who became the first Jamaican author to win the prize in its 47-year history, will be attending the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2016.

19 Oct 2015 | By Dibyajyoti Sarma

James was announced as the 2015 winner by Michael Wood, Chair of Judges, at the awards dinner at London’s Guildhall, on 13 October 2015. James was presented with a trophy from HRH The Duchess of Cornwall and a £50,000 cheque from Emmanuel Roman, Chief Executive of Man Group. The investment management firm is the prize sponsor since 2002. In addition to his £50,000 prize and trophy, James also received a designer-bound edition of his book, and a further £2,500 for being shortlisted.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a 704-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 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 in an interview with Interview Magazine, “I still consider myself a Dickensian in as much as there are aspects of storytelling I still believe in—plot, surprise, cliffhangers.”

This is the first Man Booker Prize winner for independent publisher Oneworld Publications, which is distributed in the Indian subcontinent by Pan Macmillan India.

The winner of the Man Booker Prize 2015 was chosen from 156 entries. This year’s shortlist also included two titles from Picador, Pan Macmillan’s award-winning literary fiction imprint. They are Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, published by Picador India and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life published by Picador UK.