Marlon James is a highly acclaimed Jamaican author, best known for his novels "The Book of Night Women," "A Brief History of Seven Killings," and "John Crow's Devil." Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1970, James grew up with parents who were both in the Jamaican police, his mother a detective and his father a lawyer. This upbringing exposed him to a love of literature, with his mother introducing him to prose and his father fostering a love for Shakespeare and Coleridge.
James's academic background includes a degree in Language and Literature from the University of the West Indies (1991) and a Master's in creative writing from Wilkes University (2006). His career as a writer took off after facing numerous rejections, with his debut novel, "John Crow's Devil," being rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication. This novel marked the beginning of James's exploration of Jamaican history, identity, and socio-political issues through fiction.
His novel "The Book of Night Women" delves into the subject of a slave woman's revolt in a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century, and it won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, The Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, as well as an NAACP Image Award. James continued to confront the untold history of Jamaica in his third novel, "A Brief History Of Seven Killings," which explores multiple genres, including the political thriller, the oral biography, and the classic whodunit, to narrate the assassination attempt on Bob Marley and the country's own clandestine battles of the cold war. This novel won the fiction category of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, making James the first Jamaican author ever to be shortlisted and the second Caribbean winner of the prize.
Apart from his novels, James's short fiction and nonfiction have appeared widely in various publications, including Esquire, Granta, and The Caribbean Review of Books. James currently resides in Minneapolis and teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, continuing to contribute significantly to the literary world with his compelling narratives and exploration of complex themes.