Marlon James

James grew up in Kingston, the son of two police officers, and worked in Jamaican advertising and design before moving to the United States, where a creative writing MFA and years of rejection preceded his first published novel, John Crow's Devil, after nearly seventy publisher rejections.

A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) orbits the near-fatal 1976 shooting of Bob Marley, though Marley himself is never named, telling the story through dozens of shifting narrators (gunmen, journalists, ghosts, CIA operatives) across three decades of Jamaican political violence and its bleed into New York's crack epidemic.

It won the Booker Prize in 2015, the first Jamaican winner, and James has since moved into fantasy with the Dark Star trilogy while continuing to teach creative writing at Macalester College.