An Interview with 2015 Booker Prize Winner Marlon James

Cast your minds back to the heady days of 2015... It's early autumn and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life is hotly-tipped to scoop the Booker Prize but the judges award that year's prize to A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James – an epic novel inspired by the true story of an attempted assassination attempt on Bob Marley. This week, Marlon James joins Jo and James on the podcast to tell us how winning the Booker Prize changed his life, his writing, and what he's working on next.

In this episode Jo and James speak to Marlon about:

• Why Marlon didn't think he was going to win the Booker Prize
• How he spent his prize money
• The reception A Brief History of Seven Killings received in Marlon's home country, Jamaica, versus further afield
• Get Millie Black, the new original HBO / Channel 4 crime drama he's working on
• TikTok and why reading is not the same as identifying as a reader
• How he loves writing but hates coming up with ideas for new work
• The new novel he's writing

Reading list:

• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
• Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
• The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
• The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota
• A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Further resources:

• Marlon and Jake Read Dead People

A 10th anniversary edition of A Brief History of Seven Killings will be published, with a new introduction, in June 2024.

A full transcript of the episode is available at our website.

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