Marlon James wins the Man Booker prize 2015

Unless you are a kind of bookish person, you like me perhaps would have never heard of Marlon James, and his novel ‘A brief history of seven killings', set in the 1970’s Jamaica, about the assassination attempt on Reggae legend Bob Marley.

But now we do, thanks to James winning one the most prestigious book prizes in the country if not globally. The Man Booker Prize.

Now James, with his dreadlocked hair will be featured in every British newspaper and news channel across the country and beyond.

James had said he nearly gave up writing having his first novel rejected by more than 70 publishers.

A fictional history of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976, the novel has been described as “an extraordinary book”, by Michael Wood, the chair of judges.

It was very exciting, very violent, full of swearing. It was a book we didn’t actually have any difficulty deciding on – it was a unanimous decision, a little bit to our surprise.”

James accepted the award from Camilla, the Duchess of Cambridge and said:

I just met Ben Okri, who won for The Famished Road in 1991, and it just reminded me of how much of my literary sensibilities were shaped by the Man Booker Prize."

He dedicated his win to his late father with who, he recalled, he used to have 'Shakespeare duels' as a boy.

"Who can have the longest soliloquy ... just imagine a father and son in a Jamaican rum bar.”

In so many ways it is a heavyweight of a book with absorbing characters, including hoodlums, CIA and FBI agents, ghosts, beauty queens and Keith Richards’ drug dealers.

A brief history of seven killings by Marlon James, will be my next book of reading, but as a slow reader ploughing my way through nearly 700 pages may take me some time.

Well done Marlon.

Simon Woolley