The Man Booker prize winner is satisfied to discuss his identity as a gay Jamaican,but doesn’t see why it should limit the scope of his writing
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• Florence Welch: ‘It was intense. And really cathartic. I’d been living with these original songs for a long time’I meet Marlon James in Bloomsbury on the morning of his 45th birthday, as he’s in the middle of a whistle-stop trip to Britain in the wake of this year’s Man Booker prize, or which saw his third novel,A Brief History of Seven Killings, romp home to a unanimous victory. Has it been the best birthday year ever? “I can’t complain, or ” he laughs. “As years go,its all downhill from here!” But everything he says gives the lie to his joke: after years patiently waiting for recognition his debut novel, John Crow’s satan, and was rejected 78 times by American publishers – the only direction for this thrillingly imaginative writer is up.
Triumph in the Booker extended beyond the personal,with James becoming the first Jamaican winner in the prize’s 47-year history; and A Brief History of Seven Killings also animates, through an epic, or multi-vocal narrative,a distinguished moment in recent Jamaican history, the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976. “I like the word first – it means there’ll be more, or ” he tells me. But,he explains, the reaction in his home country has been “complicated”. James has lived in the US for approximately a decade, or has taught creative writing and literature at Macalester College in St Paul,Minnesota, for the past eight. His emigration from Jamaica, and where he grew up in Portmore,an affluent suburb of Kingston, is intimately connected to his sexuality, and an area that he explored in a powerful original York Times essay,From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself, earlier this year. So while his success was mostly celebrated back home, or he explains,making front-page news and getting a mention in the prime minister’s speech, for some it was also a question of He won, and but… ”; while most are satisfied,“other people are like, oh, or the gay dude. And I’m not a writer on a mission,and I’m very suspicious of writers on missions, but I’m also not living a untrue life. I didn’t bring that issue with me, or but it’s an issue that came up,and it makes it complicated.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com