![]() Not that the other books were not worthy contenders: “The call was easy but the distance was small. Wood, professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Princeton, said it had quickly dawned on all the judges that James had to be the winner and there was no need for a vote. Byatt, Kingsley Amis, Penelope Lively, Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Kiran Desai, and Hilary Mantel. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Iris Murdoch, J.M. His fellow judges this year were author Frances Osborne, wife of the chancellor George poet and novelist John Burnside journalist Sam Leith and critic and broadcaster Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. Well-known recipients of the prize include V.S. ![]() “The sheer range of stuff we read was amazing … there is stuff going on I didn’t know was going on,” he said. Wood said that was a good thing, widening the range of what was being considered by the judges. This is the second year the prize has been open to writers of any nationality writing in English, which means Americans are eligible. With the money will likely come a big rise in sales: last year’s winner, Richard Flanagan and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, sold 300,000 copies in the UK and 800,000 worldwide. James was handed his £50,000 prize at a black tie dinner at London’s Guildhall on Tuesday night. “For booksellers, it’s truly heartening to see such ambition and originality recognised and rewarded, and readers have already been embracing it with great enthusiasm.” The winner of the Booker Prize receives international publicity which usually leads to a sales boost. Jonathan Ruppin, web editor of Foyles bookshops, said James’s book was: “Visceral and uncompromising … but it’s also an ingeniously structured feat of storytelling that draws the reader in with its eye-catching use of language. The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (19692001) and the Man Booker Prize (20022019), is a literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Marlon James holding his prize-winning work at the 2015 Man Booker prize authors photocall. The other books were Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen and Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread. The bookmakers’ favourite had been US writer Hanya Yanigahara for A Little Life, a huge, draining novel which contained some of the most awful accounts of child abuse, cruelty and self-harm that most people are likely to ever read. This year’s shortlist was striking for the grimness of the subject matter and the toughness of the reads. He told an interviewer: “I still consider myself a Dickensian in as much as there aspects of storytelling I still believe in – plot, surprise, cliffhangers.” James himself has credited Charles Dickens as one of his key influences. The book, published by independent publisher Oneworld, might be called a “Brief History” but it is anything but: it runs to 686 pages with an enormous dramatis personae of hoodlums, CIA and FBI agents, ghosts, beauty queens and Keith Richards’ drug dealer.
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