James Walton: So, thinking back to the year you won the Booker, do you remember the moment you found out you were longlisted? How was that? 

Marlon James: I think I was in Edinburgh and read it in a Jamaican newspaper, online. So they knew before me. If I remember, I just went on with things because I didn’t want to think about it too much. I didn’t want to get my hopes up or jinx it.  

JW: So your hope’s not getting up too much at that stage, but then you get shortlisted. How did that feel? 

MJ: I was slightly less surprised by the shortlist. I always thought the longlist is the real hard one, and the shortlist was… six books. I mean, I wasn’t as surprised about that. But I certainly didn’t think I was going to win. 

Jo Hamya: Why not? 

MJ: I don’t know. Maybe some sort of imposter syndrome. I just really put it to the back of my head. 

JW: Did you read the other books on the shortlist? 

MJ: Well, I’d read Tom McCarthy’s [Satin Island], because I’m a huge McCarthy fan. Sunjeev Sahota’s book The Year of The Runaways, I had read. And Chigozie’s [Obioma’s] book [The Fishermen]. I think those are the three that I read at the time. 

JW: It strikes me as a slightly weird time, that bit where the shortlisted authors do events and things together. It must almost be like being on a reality TV show in the sense that you’re comrades, but you’re also rivals. 

MJ: Yeah, you pretend to be friends… 

JW: Exactly. And how did that pretending go? 

MJ: We got along really well. I think all of us had read at least one or two of each other’s books. So by that time, for us, it didn’t really matter who won because we were just such admirers of each other’s work. 

JW: Is that really true, though? Was there no one who broke ranks and was obviously ambitious? 

MJ: Well, I guess nobody really wanted to be disappointed or to get their hopes up. I mean, so much of it is a matter of opinion. I think there was a clear favourite – the media declared it was A Little Life [by Hanya Yanagihara]. So a lot of people just assumed that book was going to win. 

JH: I really want to know what happened when you did win. Did you party? Did you go out? 

MJ: Oh man, what didn’t I do? 

JH: There’s a really famous question that used to get asked, but which has dropped out of fashion: what did you do with the prize money? 

MJ: I saved it, because I’m smart. 

JH: Oh. Investments? 

MJ: No, just in the bank. Actually, that’s not totally true. Somebody said I should buy an outrageous gift to celebrate, which is the wrong thing to say to me. So I bought a lamp that’s actually a life-sized horse. It’s literally a 12-foot by nine-foot life-sized horse, with a lampshade on its head. 

JH: Why?? 

MJ: Because I saw it and I thought, ‘this is either the greatest thing ever or the worst idea ever. I have to have it’. 

JW: What happened over the next few days and weeks after you’ve won the Booker? 

MJ: It’s pretty much madness. The interviews start from around 6am. They don’t really stop until around 9pm. There’s a hilarious video of me on, I think, Channel Four’s news programme. Nobody can understand what I’m saying because I’ve totally lost my voice. 

JH: I’m really interested to know, especially several years on, whether winning a prize that big changed your writing practice or your writing itself. I know you’ve said that Seven Killings was your ‘eff you’ novel. The novel where you set down on the page all the things you thought you couldn’t before, and where you broke convention. But afterwards, did you feel more freedom or more set back? 

MJ: I don’t know if I felt either. I didn’t really feel any sort of pressure. I don’t know if it would’ve been different if I’d had a debut novel win the Booker. I don’t know. I should ask Doug [Douglas Stuart]. For me it was because I’d been published before, and published by a small publisher, and I already knew what rock bottom felt like. So whatever happens, happens. The commercial prospects, post Booker, didn’t really scare me at all. Whether the next book sells a lot or doesn’t sell at all, it didn’t really matter because I’d been through so much of that. Also, I realised that one way to stay grounded when you’re in the middle of any type of hype is to just start writing the next book. So I had actually started thinking of the next book before Brief History was even published, before it even came out. I was already so busy in a mediaeval African fantasy world, so far removed from the present day. That’s where my head was. 

JW: There must be Booker-winning authors who really just abandon themselves, who just relish it and think, this is great. I’m famous now. I’m going to really love this, being feted everywhere. Was that a temptation? 

MJ: It was a total temptation. I totally gave in to it, of course. But there’s ‘famous’ and there’s ‘book famous’. It’s not like anybody was going to invite me to the same places they invite Usain Bolt or so on. But at the same time, being book famous certainly beats being not famous. Because for one thing – and I’ll tell you one thing that changed because of the Booker – so many countries became curious that may not have heard of me before. The book got translated into, I think, over 32 languages, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. So the exposure and the curiosity that this prize still creates around the world does change you in certain ways. 

JW: It would seem to me that it’s quite a tricky book to translate. Did you get puzzled emails from translators? 

MJ: Not really. Because I think what most translators did is translate it into whatever was their country’s street culture. They just use that language, so I think it was actually a lot easier than people thought. And also, everybody’s heard of Bob Marley. They know some Jamaican patois. Usually the person who translated the book knew more about Jamaica than me. 

JH: Something that I found really interesting is that you’ve said that you were writing more about your parents’ Jamaica than yours. I was wondering, have they read the book? What did they make of it? 

MJ: Well, my dad passed away before the book came out, so he didn’t get a chance to read it. I think my mom has read some of it. What’s really interesting is that some of the politicians who were in the book have read it. I really thought after writing this book that I couldn’t go back to Jamaica. I’d be a marked man and so on. Some of the people involved in the story have read it, and they’re just so disconnected from it. It was really strange; very uncanny in a way. Even though they were part of that history, they’re so disconnected from it now that either they don’t recognise themselves, or they think a different person did all that. But it was interesting because when I wrote this book, I was counting on the [political] party that comes off better in the book to be in power when I came back to Jamaica, so I could feel safe. But it was a party I criticised the most that came back into power when I went back and I thought, oh my God, I’m a dead man. But then they gave me an award. It was so weird being in a room with people and thinking: you know you’re in the book, right? 

JW: What did other Jamaicans make of it? On the one hand, there must have been a lot of pride, the first Jamaican to win the Booker Prize. On the other hand, was there any sense of: we know this stuff, you know this stuff, but does the world really need to know this stuff? 

MJ: I didn’t really pay attention to that. I’m sure it was there, but I think what I heard mostly was people being relieved that we were talking about it. Because a lot of this stuff, we call it the veranda discussion. You talk about it on the balcony, on the veranda, on the patio – far away from anybody else hearing. It’s not stuff we debate or come to terms with or hold people accountable for. I think for a lot of people, this book was a chance to talk about things that are usually unspeakable. 

JW: Do you go back to Jamaica much now? 

MJ:I do, actually. I’m there quite a bit. This is the thing about Jamaica, I realise: a lot of people have this idea that Jamaican and Caribbean and maybe even African communities in the diaspora tend to be more open-minded. It’s something we assume, that Jamaicans in, say, New York may be more open-minded than Jamaicans in Kingston. That’s actually not the case at all. What I find is that the country’s constantly moving ahead. A lot of emigrants I come in contact with, they hold onto the Jamaica they left behind. So I’ve actually had more criticism from Jamaicans in the diaspora than Jamaicans in the country. I think in the diaspora there’s a sense that I’ve aired dirty laundry. 

JH: I’d like to ask about something else you’ve written – a television series for HBO, Get Millie Black. Can you tell us about that? 

MJ: Sure, it’s a co-production between HBO and Channel Four. It’s a story about a Jamaican woman who left for London aged nine. She worked for Scotland Yard and left with a dark cloud over her name and came back to Jamaica. She ends up being embroiled in a case that takes her right back to the UK she left behind. It’s not based on anything. It was just an original story that I wrote. 

JH: Can I ask how screenwriting compares to novel writing? 

MJ: Well, novel writing is a pleasure. Dot, dot, dot. 

JH: Whether you’re writing for television or writing books, do characters stay with you? It’s quite a vivid process that you go through as a writer, having favourites, almost falling in love with them. When you finish a relationship, you think about the person you left for months after… 

MJ: Sometimes. A lot of times I don’t. I think one of the reasons why my books are mostly pretty long is because I can’t let go. And particularly A Brief History where I kept jumping. Every decade, I’m like, but what are they doing in this decade? So I do think when I end a book is when I’m ready to let go. I don’t think I’ve thought about the lives of characters afterwards, or not much. I’m not driven by the idea of sequels, for example. Because I think the reason why my books are long is that I want to spend as much time as I can to get the full story. I always have a problem ending novels. With A Brief History, I went on for a good 20 pages before I realised, ‘dude, this book ended 20 pages ago’. 

JW: What’s the most fun part of the writing process for you, and what are the least fun parts? 

MJ: The most fun part for me is the actual writing, actually. 

JH: No one ever says that! 

MJ: I know, but I love it. The actual writing, the typing, getting the idea down on the page. And for me, I am open enough that I’m still sometimes surprised by where my own stories go. And that to me is a lot of fun. The thing I absolutely hate doing is conceiving the idea. One of the reasons I think why I am not under pressure to match previous sales or follow the success of the Booker and so on is that I have enough pressure on my own to decide what am I going to write next. I never remember the process of beginning a book. I remember ending them. I never remember beginning them. And I keep going, oh man, I forgot that this is hard. I don’t like this at all. Figuring out whose story it is, what voice it should be in. Is it third person, second, first? And I don’t have an efficient way of doing it. All I can do is keep writing until I go, this isn’t working, and start over. 

JW: This might be a slightly brutal question, but do you have any idea of what the next book is? Have you got something lined up? 

MJ: Oh yeah. I know it exactly. 

JW: And are you allowed to say? 

MJ: I would say it’s about a hidden, not-spoken-about corner of Jamaican life. I’m looking at it from the 1940s to now. 

JW: And do we know what that hidden aspect is, or is that a secret? 

MJ: I’m so not telling you! 

JH: You were pushing your luck there, James. 

This an edited excerpt from an episode of the Booker Prize Podcast which was first released in August 2023. You can listen to the full episode here.