Marlon James won the 2015 Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings.
James’s ambitious novel, published in 2014, examines the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1976 and the violence and political instability that followed. Its narrative unfolds through numerous voices, shifting across Jamaica, the United States and several decades.
The judges selected the book from a six-title shortlist, and the winner was announced on 13 October 2015. James became the first Jamaican-born author to win the prize, an important milestone for Caribbean literature in the award’s history.
The title can cause confusion because the novel is not a conventional murder mystery about seven isolated crimes. It is a sprawling historical and political work whose many narrators reconstruct events from competing perspectives. The book was also James’s third novel, following John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women.