Marlon James

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Marlon James at the Texas Book Festival in Austin (2014)

Marlon James (born November 24, 1970 in Kingston , Jamaica ) is a Jamaican writer.

Life

childhood and education

Marlon James grew up in a middle-class family in Portmore , a suburb of Kingston. He has seven siblings. His father was a police officer and later worked as a lawyer, according to other sources as a judge; his mother also worked as a police officer. In high school, James came into contact with the works of Shakespeare and Dickens . As a teenager he read a lot in his spare time, including novels, poems and comics. James graduated from the University of the West Indies , where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1991 . He then worked in advertising for more than ten years. James has worked as a copywriter, graphic designer and art director for the Jamaican dancehall interpreter Sean Paul and T Magazine for the New York Times, among others . During this time, he says he hardly wrote and did not read for a while. Later he attended numerous readings and workshops at the Calabash Literary Festival .

Lacking opportunities in Jamaica, he began writing again and offered a draft of his first novel to literary agents in New York to no avail . At a literature workshop in Jamaica, the American literary professor Kaylie Jones became aware of a chapter in James' draft novel and brought him to Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre ( Pennsylvania ), from which he received a master's degree in creative writing in 2006 . From 2007 he taught as an assistant professor, the subjects English and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul ( Minnesota ).

Marlon James lives in Minneapolis and is openly gay. He counts Charles Dickens to be one of the most influential authors and also has a great predilection for the fantasy genre, including the Gormenghast novels. In addition to his novels, James has published several short stories and has contributed to the Caribbean Review of Books , Esquire and Granta magazines .

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First novels

James made his debut as a novelist in 2005 with John Crow's Devil , which was also translated into German under the title Tod und Teufel in Gibbeah or Der Kult . The story is set in a village in Jamaica in the late 1950s and is about a preacher addicted to alcohol, whose congregation is confronted with an apostle preaching condemnation who plans to enforce a strict code of conduct. John Crow's Devil was nominated for best first work at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ( Art Seidenbaum Award ) and for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2006. In 2009, James published The Book of Night Women, his second novel about a Jamaican female slave during colonial times who, after attempting rape, kills her tormentor and joins a group of female slaves who plan to murder their white “masters”. James wrote the novel in the slave dialect after studying Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple again . The Book of Night Women brought him first literary prizes with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award . The book also made it to the finals of the National Book Critics Circle Award .

Success with "A Brief History of Seven Killings"

The previous high point in James' literary output presented with his third novel published in 2014 A Brief History of Seven Killings (dt Title:. A brief history of seven murders ) which will, in the slums of his native Kingston plays. In the fictional story about the actual assassination attempt on the Jamaican singer Bob Marley in December 1976, he focuses on the eponymous seven contract killers and their fates, while Marley himself is not mentioned by name in the book and only as "the singer" (Eng. "The Singer") is called. It took James over four years to write the almost 700-page novel with over 75 characters and voices, with the support of four researchers and using the jargon of the 1970s. A total of five translators worked for the 853 pages of the German edition at Heyne Verlag.

A Brief History of Seven Killings earned the author numerous awards in 2015. Michiko Kakutani ( New York Times ) compared the work with a " Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come , but also with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner ". James himself does not refer to Tarantino, but to David Cronenberg ( A History of Violence , Deadly Promises - Eastern Promises ) as a source of inspiration for his works, which also explicitly depict violence and sex. In addition to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the American Book Award , he was the first Jamaican writer to win the British Man Booker Prize . The US television program provider HBO secured the rights to the book for a television series, for which James is also to write the script for the pilot episode .

Planned fantasy trilogy "Dark Star"

In 2019, James published the first of his three-part fantasy saga Dark Star with the novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf . Hailed by the author and later also by American literary criticism as the African counterpart to the successful fantasy television series Game of Thrones , the first part focuses on a homosexual main character called "Seeker" (original: "Tracker"), who is supposed to find a kidnapped child . The action is set in a kingdom in Africa far in the past. According to Jochen Overbeck ( Spiegel Online ) James used inter alia in Benin and Nigeria -based Yoruba religion as well as those of the ancient tribes around the Zambezi -flow.

The book, which contains detailed depictions of violence and sex, was shortlisted for the National Book Award the year it was published . Also in 2019, James was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the Year.

Catalog raisonné

Novels

  • 2005: John Crow's Devil
    • German: Death and the devil in Gibbeah. Translated from Wolfgang Binder. Verlag F. Stülten, Escheburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-9813133-0-7 .
  • 2009: The Book of Night Women
  • 2014: A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • 2019: Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Short stories

  • 2006: Iron Balloons
  • 2007: Bronx Noir
  • 2007: Silent Voices
  • 2013: Kingston Noir

Awards

  • 2010: Dayton Literary Peace Prize for The Book of Night Women
  • 2010: Minnesota Book Award for The Book of Night Women
  • 2012: Go On Girl! Book Club Author of the Year
  • 2013: Musgrave medal in silver
  • 2015: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • 2015: American Book Award for A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • 2015: OCM Bocas Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature for A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • 2015: Minnesota Book Award for A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • 2015: Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • 2015: Green Carnation Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • 2016: Shortlist of the International DUBLIN Literary Award with A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • 2019: Finalist at the National Book Award with Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Web links

Commons : Marlon James  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Man Booker Prize for Fiction Winner: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James at literaryfestivals.co.uk, October 14, 2015 (accessed October 15, 2015).
  2. ^ A b c d Preston, Rohan: Cool guy, hot novel . In: Star Tribune , October 19, 2014, p. 1E.
  3. ↑ a b Akbar, Arifa: 'I don't believe in PG violence' . In: The Independent , October 15, 2015, p. 44.
  4. ^ A 'Post-Post-Colonial' Take On The Violent Birth Of Modern Jamaica . In: Weekend All Things Considered , 2014 (interview transcript accessed via the Literature Resource Center )
  5. ↑ a b Harve, Chris: Stir it up . In: The Daily Telegraph , June 13, 2015, pp. 12-13.
  6. ↑ a b c d Marlon James . In: Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2015 (accessed October 13, 2015 via the Literature Resource Center ).
  7. ↑ a b Rohter, Larry: Once on this island: Marlon James tries to make sense of the Jamaica of his childhood . In: International New York Times . October 3, 2014, p. 9.
  8. ^ Building Trust . In: Times Leader , Wilkes-Barre, September 13, 2006, p. A2.
  9. ↑ a b c d A Brief History of Seven Killings wins 2015 Man Booker Prize ( Memento of the original from October 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at themanbookerprize.com, October 13, 2015 (accessed October 13, 2015). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / themanbookerprize.com
  10. ^ PR Newswire US: Joan Didion Named Winner of Los Angeles Times Kirsch Award; Book Prize Finalists Announced; 26th Annual Literary Awards to be Presented April 28 . March 10, 2006 5:01 PM GMT (accessed via Nexis ).
  11. ↑ Bufferd, Lauenstein: Jamaican lament . In: BookPage. October 2004, p. 23.
  12. ↑ Salvation is a fiction , review in Der Tagesspiegel of March 16, 2017, accessed April 19, 2017
  13. ↑ Kakutani, Michiko: Once on this island: Marlon James tries to make sense of the Jamaica of his childhood . In: The New York Times , September 22, 2014, The Arts and Cultural Desk, p. 1.
  14. ↑ Jochen Overbeck: Fantasy novel by Marlon James: More than an African "Game of Thrones" . In: Spiegel Online , October 23, 2019.
  15. ↑ Black Leopard, Red Wolf . In: nationalbook.org (accessed October 24, 2019).
  16. ↑ Marlon James . In: time.com (accessed October 24, 2019).
personal data
SURNAME James, Marlon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jamaican writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1970
PLACE OF BIRTH Kingston , Jamaica