When Marlon James was announced the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize last night at London's Guildhall for A Brief History of Seven Killings, the first person he hugged was his U.K. publisher Juliet Mabey of Oneworld.
Mabey had signed his second novel The Book of Night Women - his debut, he told the Telegraph, had received 70 rejections - for Oneworld's launch into fiction in 2009. She said then that she would enter it for the Booker. That venture did not bear fruit, but six years later, James has indeed won the prestigious English-language fiction prize.
Oneworld is reprinting 107,500 copies of the paperback edition of A Brief History of Seven Killings, and is preparing a limited edition hardback (10,000 copies) that will feature a platinum record on the cover (instead of the black vinyl), using a silver foil. Meanwhile, James is embarking on an intensive round of media interviews. In the U.S., publisher Riverhead is going back to press for 75,000 copies.
Mabey said: "We are utterly blown away by Marlon's Man Booker Prize. He is an incredibly mature writer and one of the most powerful novelists writing today. His writing is going from strength to strength, and A Brief History of Seven Killings is definitely his most ambitious novel to date - it's a heavyweight, mature, and complex novel - and we couldn’t be more proud to publish it. It has been an astonishing year for fiction and this year’s Man Booker longlist showcased some stunning books from around the world, so we are truly thrilled that the Man Booker jury has chosen A Brief History of Seven Killings as this year's best novel."
A Brief History of Seven Killings is a 686-page epic, set in the author's native Jamaica and offering a fictional history of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976. Michael Wood, chair of the judges, said: "This book is startling in its range of voices and registers, running from the patois of the street posse to The Book of Revelation. It is a representation of political times and places, from the CIA intervention in Jamaica to the early years of crack gangs in New York and Miami.
"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. It moves at a terrific pace and will come to be seen as a classic of our times."
Mabey reported that James had started work on his next novel, described as an African Game of Thrones and set during the Middle Ages. His agent is Ellen Levine at Trident Media.
A version of this article first appeared in the U.K.s' BookBrunch.
