The author of The Disappearers, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2026, on realising that novels could be more than schoolwork, re-reading Toni Morrison, and trusting rumours more than facts
Marlon James
Marlon James won the Booker Prize in 2015. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica
James is the author of the New York Times bestselling Moon Witch, Spider King; the Sunday Times bestselling, National Book Award-finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf; the Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings; The Book of Night Women and John Crow’s Devil. In addition to the Booker Prize, his novels have won the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. James now lives in New York City.
A Brief History of Seven Killings not only won the Booker Prize 2015, but was also the winner of the American Book Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Book of Night Women won the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the NAACP Image Award.
James is the creator of the HBO/Channel 4 crime drama series Get Millie Black. He is a professor at Macalester College in St Paul.
The Disappearers was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.
Marlon James on The Disappearers
‘The Disappearers is based on a violent incident that was rumoured to have happened but was never proven, at least not up to the point when I began writing. But in Jamaica we trust rumours more than facts, so the fact that people kept whispering about it meant it was true. But I’m more concerned with an incident’s aftermath than the thing itself, and fiction is ideally placed to bring what might be a closed-off chapter right into the open.’
Read the full interview here.
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Winner of The Booker Prize 2015
- By
- Marlon James
- Published by
- Oneworld Publications
In a dazzling display of masterful storytelling, Marlon James explores the extraordinary backstory to the attempted assassination of Bob Marley
Other nominated books
A deeply human story of men who must make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands
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