Paul Beatty

Beatty grew up in Los Angeles, took a psychology degree before an MFA at Brooklyn College under Allen Ginsberg, and first made his name as a slam poet, winning the inaugural Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam championship in 1990 and publishing two collections before turning to fiction.

The White Boy Shuffle (1996), his exuberant debut about a reluctant Black messiah-poet, announced the voice; Tuff and Slumberland refined it across Harlem politics and Berlin DJ booths. Then The Sellout, a scorched-earth satire of American race relations narrated by a man who reinstates segregation in his own erased hometown, won the Man Booker Prize in 2016, making Beatty the first American ever to win it, after, by his own account, some eighteen publishers had passed on the manuscript.

He has taught creative writing at Columbia University and edited Hokum, an anthology of African-American humor as unclassifiable as his own uncompromising fiction.