Marlon James

A Brief History of Seven Killings runs seventy-six voices around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976, and took the Booker in 2015, the first for a Jamaican writer. His first novel had been rejected around eighty times and he had nearly given up writing when it was finally taken. Black Leopard, Red Wolf opens an African fantasy sequence built out of the continent's own mythologies instead of European ones. He is gay, left Jamaica partly because of it, and has written about that directly. He teaches in Minnesota.