Jamaican-born writer’s works have won a host of major prizes;
Tuesday, March 29, at 8 p.m.
TACOMA, Wash. – Celebrated Jamaican-born author Marlon James, whose powerful writing about his homeland and its people attracted one of the literary world’s most prestigious awards, will give a public lecture at the University of Puget Sound.
The critically-acclaimed novelist and Macalester College English professor will present a talk titled “The Books That Made Me Write Books,” at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, March 29, in Schneebeck Concert Hall. Ticket information and a map of campus are below. Booking is recommended.
James’ most recent novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, tells the 1976 attempted assassination of Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley. Part fact, part fiction, enlists the voices of a host of characters—gangsters, ghosts, spies, and musicians—to create an unorthodox thriller. Widespread critical acclaim followed its 2014 debut. Last fall, the surprised author found himself on a plane to London to receive the 2015 Mann Booker Prize for Fiction, the United Kingdom’s most-coveted literary prize.
This marked the first time in the Booker Prize’s 47-year history that the honor went to a Jamaican writer. The book also won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Television producer HBO is making the story into a series.
Two earlier books from the Minneapolis-based, 45-year-old writer also attracted accolades. James’ first book, John Crow’s Devil, about the fierce battle between two flawed preachers in a remote Jamaican village, was passed multiple times before one inspired editor recognized its brilliance. The book made The New York Times Editors’ Choice list and was a finalist for the first fiction Los Angeles Times Book Prize. James’ second novel, The Book of Night Women, imagining a 19th-century revolt by slave women at a Jamaican plantation, won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction.
The son of a police detective and a judge, James grew up in Kingston's better suburbs. But his relationship with the strictly religious and conservative community in Jamaica—a vestige of 300 years of English colonization—was a difficult one.
Last year, writing for The New York Times, he described his childhood at an all-boys school, where he lived in constant fear of being “outed” as gay. James wrote that to “save” his older and cooler brother, he pretended the two were not related. To save himself, he buried his head in books by Dickens and Mark Twain. One day after school, James wrote, he walked for miles to Kingston Harbor and stopped at the edge of the dock, thinking “next time I would just keep walking.”
At 28, after returning home from the relative liberty of the University of the West Indies, on the edge of Kingston, James tried to find solace in the church. But it was reading, not the Bible, but Salman Rushdie’s Shame that turned around his life.
“I had never read anything like it. It was like a hand grenade inside a tulip … It made me realize that the present was something I could write my way out of,” he recounted in his New York Times essay.
James wrote his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, at age 34, while making a living at a Jamaican advertising firm. Two years later, a job offer from Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minn., gave him his longed-for escape from the island.
James flourished on the American college campus, thinking as he wished, dressing as he wished, and writing what he wished. He reveals that his three current books would shock those at home, not only for their blunt language and electrifying stories, but because of his unhesitating honesty about Jamaica, its people, its history, and its politics.
“It’s time that we talk about all of this stuff,” he told Vogue magazine in a 2015 interview. “Our history of post-colonialism, the failure of independence, economic problems, gun violence, drugs, extortion, how much our politics are linked to violence.” James plans for his next work to be a fantasy, titled Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and the first in a series. James graduated from the University of the West Indies in 1991, with a degree in language and literature, and from Wilkes University in Pennsylvania in 2006, with a master’s degree in creative writing.
Marlon James's lecture is sponsored by the Susan Resneck Pierce Lectures in Public Affairs and the Arts, University of Puget Sound’s premier lecture series. The series brings intellectuals, public figures, writers, and artists to the university to present challenging ideas that stimulate further exploration and discussion on campus.
Past Pierce lecturers have included The Washington Post political writer E.J. Dionne; Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz; Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka; economist Robert Reich; author Carlos Fuentes; psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison; filmmaker Spike Lee; the Hon. Cory Booker, now a
U. S. senator; political commentator David Brooks; columnist Thomas Friedman; playwright Edward Albee; race and religion scholar Cornel West; musician Philip Glass; playwright Suzan-Lori Parks; dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp; historian and television host Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat, and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
FOR TICKETS: Tickets are available online at tickets.pugetsound.edu or Wheelock Information Center, 253.879.3100. Admission is $20 for the general public. The lecture is free for Puget Sound faculty, staff, and students with ID, but tickets are required. Any remaining tickets will be available at the door.
For directions and a map of the campus: pugetsound.edu/directions
For accessibility information, please contact accessibility@pugetsound.edu or 253.879.3236, or visit pugetsound.edu/accessibility.
Press photos of Marlon James can be downloaded from pugetsound.edu/pressphotos.
Photos on page: Marlon James and two of his books. Courtesy of Marlon James.
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