Marlon James

Marlon James is a Jamaican-American novelist and one of the most celebrated contemporary writers in the English-speaking world. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1970, he studied literature at the University of the West Indies and received an MFA from Wilkes University. His debut novel John Crow's Devil (2005) was rejected by dozens of publishers before finally being published and winning the Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction. James's breakthrough came with A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), a wildly ambitious, multi-voiced novel about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 and its aftermath, spanning several decades and narrated by dozens of characters. The novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2015, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2015, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It is considered one of the great Jamaican novels and a landmark of World English literature. James's subsequent Dark Star trilogy—Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), Moon Witch, Spider King (2022), and The Story of the Candle (forthcoming)—is an epic African fantasy of extraordinary ambition. He is a professor of creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and lives between the United States and Jamaica.