Paul Beatty

Paul Beatty (2016)

Paul Beatty (born June 9, 1962 in Los Angeles ) is an American writer.

Life

Paul Beatty attended El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills . He received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and a Masters in Psychology from Boston University .

The African American Beatty first appeared as a poetry slammer . As champion of the Grand Poetry Slam of the New York Nuyorican Poets Cafe , he received a publishing contract and was able to publish his first volume of poetry Big Bank Take Little Bank (1991), which he followed in 1994 with Joker, Joker, Deuce and then his first in 1996 Novel The White Boy Shuffle . In 2006 he edited the anthology Hokum on African American humor. His novel Slumberland (2008) is about an American disk jockey in Berlin .

The satire The Sellout received the National Book Critics Circle Award in the “Novel” category in 2015 and the Man Booker Prize in 2016 . Beatty is the first American author to win the British Literature Prize. The narrator of The Sellout , the son of a controversial psychologist, comes from the fictional "agricultural ghetto" Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles and has been exposed to racially charged psychological studies since childhood. After his father was shot by the police and the existence of financially profitable memoirs turned out to be a lie, the narrator also finds that Dickens has been removed from the California map. He then decides to work with the city's most famous resident to reintroduce slavery and segregation at the local high school. The legal dispute about it leads them to the Supreme Court . According to the Man Booker Prize jury, The Sellout is “a shocking and unexpectedly funny” portrait of Los Angeles and takes a relentless look at the “racial relations in the USA”. The German translation was published in October 2018 under the title Der Verräter .

Beatty lives in New York and teaches as an Associate Professor at Columbia University .

literature

• Michael Basseler: Cultural Memory and Trauma in the Contemporary Afro-American Novel. Theoretical foundation, forms of expression, development tendencies. Scientific publishing house Trier, Trier 2008, ISBN 978-3-86821-013-2 .

Works (selection)

• The Sellout (Novel, 2015)
  • The traitor , by Henning Ahrens ; Luchterhand, Munich 2018. ISBN 978-3-630-87575-0
• Slumberland (novel, 2008)
  • Slumberland , German by Robin Detje ; Blumenbar, Munich 2009. ISBN 978-3-936738-60-5
• (Ed.): Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor (2006)
• Tuff (novel, 2000)
• The White Boy Shuffle (Novel, 1996)
  • The slave messiah , German by Ulrich Blumenbach ; Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 1999. ISBN 978-3-871-34303-2
  • also as Schlechter Danzen , same translation; btb, Munich 2018. ISBN 978-3-442-71665-4
• Joker, Joker, Deuce (collection of poems, 1994)
• Slam! Poetry: violent poetry from America ; Dr.-Haus Galrev, Berlin 1994. ISBN 978-3-9101-6147-4 [anthology with six authors]
• Big Bank Take Little Bank , (collection of poems, 1991)

Awards

• 2015: National Book Critics Circle Award for The Sellout
• 2016: Man Booker Prize for The Sellout

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Beatty in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Paul Beatty in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Short biography and reviews of works by Paul Beatty at perlentaucher.de
• Chris Jackson: Our Thing: An Interview with Paul Beatty , in: The Paris Review , May 7, 2015
• Paul Beatty , at African American Literature Book Club (AALBC)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Description of the novel at themanbookerprize.com (accessed on October 26, 2016).
2. ^ Paul Beatty wins "Man Booker Prize" at sueddeutsche.de, October 26, 2016 (accessed October 26, 2016).
3. ↑ Book announcement . In: portal.dnb.de (accessed on June 14, 2018).