Marlon James

Marlon James (born 24 November 1970 ) is a Jamaican writer.

He is the second Caribbean winner of the prize, following Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul who won in 1971.

James's most recent work, Moon Witch, Spider King (2022) is the second in a planned fantasy series which began with Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019).

He is a 1991 graduate of the University of the West Indies, where he read Language and Literature.

He left Jamaica to escape anti-gay violence and economic conditions that he felt would mean career stagnation, later explaining: "Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica."

He is the author of five novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won him the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022).

Now living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the U.S., James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

He is also a faculty lecturer at St. Francis College's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.

James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to parents who were both in the Jamaican police: his mother (who gave him his first prose book, a collection of stories by O. Henry) became a detective and his father (from whom James took a love of Shakespeare and Coleridge) a lawyer.

James attended Kingston's prestigious Wolmer's Trust High School for Boys.

James' first novel, John Crow's Devil (2005) – which was rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication – tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957.

He received a master's degree in creative writing from Wilkes University in Pennsylvania (2006).

James has taught English and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, since 2007.

He is also a faculty lecturer at St. Francis College's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.

His second novel, The Book of Night Women (2009), is about a slave woman's revolt in a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century.

His 2014 novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, explores several decades of Jamaican history and political instability through the perspectives of many narrators.

James's 2014 novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, portrays "a passionate, often angry account of postcolonial society struggling to balance identity and a burgeoning criminal element."

The novel has twelve narrators, contributing to the "excess" that Sheri-Marie Harrison explores in her article "Excess in A Brief History of Seven Killings".

She explains: "James's rejection of a purely nationalist tradition, like that of other authors in his cohort, concretizes his critique of the ways nationalism distracts us from the increased deregulation of global capital and its production of material inequality around the globe. This disruption of privileged tropes in the interest of turning attention onto the transnational forces that structure inequality helps to explain James's use of 'a poetics of excess.' His experimentation with form functions to rework now familiar paradigms and themes that have been central to the literary imagination of postcolonial realities for a little over half a century."

It won the fiction category of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, having been the first book by a Jamaican author ever to be shortlisted.

In February 2019, James gave the seventh annual Tolkien Lecture at Pembroke College, Oxford.

In 2020, James began co-hosting with his editor Jake Morrissey a literary podcast called "Marlon and Jake Read Dead People" that explores, in a casual setting, the work of deceased authors.

In 2021, James began writing his first television series for HBO and Channel 4 titled Get Millie Black.

Themes in James's work span religion and the supernatural, sexuality, violence, and colonialism.

Often, his novels display the struggle to find an identity, whether it be as a slave or a postcolonial inhabitant of Jamaica.

In John Crow's Devil, his first novel, James explores postcolonial Jamaica through a religiously charged, archetypal battle of good and evil.

His characters in this novel represent, through their archetypal portrayals, many facets of humanity including hope.

Despite the particular setting, the novel "conveys archetypal situations that reside in the collective unconsciousness."

Additionally, this piece of Caribbean gothic reveals the power of guilt and hypocrisy both in a person and in a community, and generally reveals truths of human nature.

The ghosts of colonialism are more subtle, but the instability and struggle for identity are clear to the reader.

In The Book of Night Women, James challenges the traditional slave narrative by presenting a protagonist (Lilith) who approaches her enslavement with complex duality, despite the constant description of antagonism between slaves and masters on a plantation in Jamaica.

Lilith hates the masters, but much of the novel deals with how she "aspires to obtain a privileged stature within plantation society by submitting to the sexual subjugation of a white overseer, Robert Quinn".

This is additionally challenged by Lilith and Robert's "love", leading the reader to question the limits of love and relationships.

James intends to have readers root for Robert and Lilith, but then catch themselves, as Robert Quinn has a reputation as a brutal, violent overseer—even ordering Lilith to be severely whipped.

The situation for the reader is further complicated because Quinn is Irish, another population that was looked down upon during the time period.

While this at times brings him sympathy, his whiteness overshadows his Irishness.

Additionally, the novel explores the complexity of what it is to be a woman, with some characters having deep connections to Obeah and Myal spiritualism.

The female slaves are portrayed as strong-willed and intelligent, while the male slaves are often portrayed as weak, thoughtless, and even traitorous.

"Rape, torture, murder and other dehumanizing acts propel the narrative, never failing to shock in both their depravity and their humanness. It is this complex intertwining that makes James’s book so disturbing and so eloquent".

The novel "defies hegemonic notions of empire by pointing out the explosive and antagonistic relationship between colonizers and colonized."