Jamaican author Marlon James on Tuesday won the Man Booker Prize for “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, a re-telling of the attempted assassination of musician Bob Marley.
James, 44, is the first Jamaican to win the prestigious annual literary prize for best novel in its 47-year history.
“Oh my god, oh wow,” James said as he took to the podium in dreadlocks and a tuxedo after being announced the winner at the ceremony in London.
“This is so sort of ridiculous I think I’m going to wake up tomorrow and it didn’t happen,” he added, as he dedicated the award to his late father.
Set in Kingston, the 686-page crime tale traces the rise of the drug trade on the Caribbean island and contains a whole chapter written in Jamaican patois.
It beat bookmaker’s favourite, US author Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” to take the £50,000 (67,000 euro, $77,000) first prize.
“It is a crime novel that moves beyond the world of crime and takes us deep into a recent history we know far too little about,” said chair of judges Michael Wood after the winner was announced.
“It moves at a terrific pace and will come to be seen as a classic of our times.”
Wood praised the book’s “startling” range of voices and ability to range from early crack gangs in Miami and New York to CIA intervention in Jamaica.
The New York Times had described the book as “epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex”.
The Man Booker Prize was previously open only to fiction written in English by authors from Britain, Ireland, the Commonwealth and Zimbabwe but this is the second year it has been open to all nationalities.
Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”, a disturbing tale of male friendship with graphic descriptions of child sex abuse, had been the 6/4 favourite to win.
Also shortlisted were Briton Sunjeev Sahota’s “The Year of the Runaways”, “The Fishermen” by Nigeria’s Chigozie Obioma, American author Anne Tyler’s “A Spool of Blue Thread” and British writer Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island”.
The relative lack of established big-name authors on the shortlist had raised some eyebrows.
Salman Rushdie — whose “Midnight’s Children” took the prize in 1981 and was judged best novel ever to do so in 1993 — said his days of winning were “gone”.
“If you look at the list this year, other than Anne Tyler there seems to be a desire to move away from established names,” Rushdie was quoted as saying in Monday’s Daily Telegraph.
“No (Kazuo) Ishiguro, no (Margaret) Attwood, no (Jonathan) Franzen… I haven’t been on a Booker Prize shortlist for 20 years, so those days are gone.”
Authors who were on the long list but failed to be shortlisted included Marilynne Robinson and Anne Enright.