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The Man Booker Prize 2015

Marlon James awarded his winner's cheque 2015
Winner
Shortlist
Longlist

A rich winning book narrated in West Indian patois with bouts of poetry, and 75 characters – both living and dead – chipping in. Marlon James became the first Jamaican to win the prize

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a story of Bob Marley (or ‘The Singer’ as he is termed), a botched assassination, drugs, violence, gangs, swearing, reggae and the CIA. The chair of judges, Michael Wood, confessed that the choice of winner wasn’t put to a vote, because: ‘as we talked certain books seemed further away… and then it dawned on us, this was the book’.

On winning, the sartorially-minded James said: ‘I can go to Gieves & Hawkes, finally get my Ozwald Boateng suit.’

A Brief History of Seven Killings
A Brief History of Seven Killings

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Winner of The Booker Prize 2015

Published by
Oneworld Publications
In a dazzling display of masterful storytelling, Marlon James explores the extraordinary backstory to the attempted assassination of Bob Marley

The shortlist

Satin Island
Tom McCarthy’s strange and elusive vision of a Kafkaesque world in contemporary London, where a company man begins to think for himself…
The Fishermen
Chigozie Obioma combines classic African storytelling with contemporary fiction in this haunting fable suffused with supernatural power
A Spool of Blue Thread
Anne Tyler’s narrative spools back through three generations of Whitshanks, revealing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that shape a family
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara’s deft depiction of heartbreak becomes a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance

The longlist

The 2015 judges