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Wilkes University alumnus Marlon James has won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”
The international prize, one of the literary world’s most prestigious, was presented Tuesday in London.
James, a native of Jamaica, is a 2006 graduate of Wilkes’ graduate creative writing program. James, now an English professor at Macalester College in Minneapolis, came to study at Wilkes at the invitation of creative writing faculty member Kaylie Jones after she met him while she was in Jamaica and read some of his work.
His thesis project at Wilkes eventually became his second published novel, “The Book of Night Women.”
The award-winning book is a fictional history of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976. The nearly 700-page novel chronicles the lives of gunmen, drug dealers, CIA agents and ghosts, taking readers from West Kingston, Jamaica, to New York City and back to Jamaica over a 30-year span.
First awarded in 1969, the Man Booker Prize is considered the leading prize for high-quality fiction written in English. With the win, James joins a distinguished list of previous winners that include Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Iris Murdoch. The winner receives 50,000 pounds in British currency, the equivalent of about $100,000 in U.S. dollars.
“I recognized right away that he was a huge talent,” Jones said in a statement released by the university. “I asked him to send me his whole novel. I saw in the first paragraph that he was a genius. Everybody recognized it right away at Wilkes.”
Bonnie Culver, director of the graduate creative writing program at Wilkes, said James was a member of the program’s first graduating class.
Culver was James’ advisor in the 18-month low-residency program, which requires participating students to spend eight days on campus in January and another eight days in June. The rest of the time, they work online with their faculty writer/mentor through Skype and email. Short story writer/novelist/editor Robert Mooney was James’ mentor.
“He was not only one of the most talented students, he was also very committed and disciplined. If we started class at 9, you could walk in the library at 8 and find him with his papers spread about a desk,” Culver said.
Culver estimates James went through about 10 drafts of his award-winning novel before he submitted it for publishing. “He makes it look easy because he’s so talented, but he spent about seven years on that book.”
Culver noted that the novel has about 30 characters and 15 different story lines, “but everything’s connected and everything’s told from their different points of view. She said James tried to start the book for his thesis while in the Wilkes program, “but he put it away because he couldn’t figure out the structure.”
Culver said the Booker Prize is “the most prestigious” literary award ever won by a Wilkes graduate.
James was in London on Wednesday and attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.
According to Wilkes University, The Booker is the latest in a list of accolades for James’ book. Nominated for the PEN Open Book Award by the PEN American Center, “A Brief History of Seven Killings” placed on the BBC’s “The Top 10 Books of 2014” and the New York Times Book Review’s Top 10 Books of 2014. It also was named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Publishers Weekly and BuzzFeed Books, among others.
The novel received a 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, won a Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.