Marlon James | Signed First Edition

About Marlon James

Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1970. He grew up in a country where literature and violence existed in uncomfortably close proximity, where the political turbulence of the 1970s played out on the streets, and where Bob Marley was both cultural ambassador and assassination target. All of that finds its way into his fiction, sometimes obliquely, sometimes head-on. He graduated from the University of the West Indies in 1991 with a degree in Language and Literature, and later completed a Master’s in creative writing at Wilkes University in 2006. He has taught at Macalester College in Minnesota since 2007, dividing his time between the American Midwest and New York, a long way geographically from Kingston but never very far from it imaginatively.

His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected seventy-eight times before being accepted for publication. It tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in the 1950s, and though it arrived quietly, it announced a writer who was not interested in making things easy for the reader or for himself. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

The Book of Night Women followed in 2009, a brutal and beautiful novel set on a Jamaican plantation in the early nineteenth century, following a slave woman’s involvement in a rebellion. It won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and an NAACP Image Award. It is, among other things, one of the most unsparing accounts of the mechanics of slavery in contemporary historical fiction, written with a fury that never tips into polemic.

A Brief History of Seven Killings, published in 2014, won the Man Booker Prize, making James the first Jamaican author to take home the UK’s most prestigious literary award. It is a vast, polyphonic novel built around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Kingston in 1976, told through the voices of more than a dozen narrators across several decades, spanning Jamaican gang warfare, CIA involvement in Caribbean politics, the crack cocaine epidemic in 1980s New York, and the long aftermath of violence on individual lives. It also won the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and in 2024 was named by the New York Times Book Review among the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

His subsequent work has taken a sharp turn into fantasy. Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), the first volume of a planned Dark Star trilogy set in a mythic version of ancient Africa, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Moon Witch, Spider King followed in 2022. It is a significant shift in register, though the preoccupations, power, identity, the violence done to those without it, remain consistent. He created and wrote the television crime drama Get Millie Black for HBO and Channel 4, which aired in 2024 and 2025 to critical acclaim, further expanding his reach beyond the literary world.

In 2018 he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and in 2019 was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. His work has been translated widely and his reputation continues to grow on both sides of the Atlantic. He is, by any measure, one of the most distinctive and ambitious novelists writing in English today.