Marlon James

Marlon James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for A Brief History of Seven Killings, making him the first Jamaican author to take home the U.K.’s most prestigious literary award. In addition to the Man Booker Prize, A Brief History of Seven Killings won the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Minnesota Book Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 2024 was one of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

Marlon James’ new novel is The Disappearers (Riverhead Books, September 1, 2026) about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences. The Disappearers has been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize and received star reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The New York Times called it a “masterpiece.” His earlier novel John Crow's Devil was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, as well as a New York Times Editor's Choice. His novel The Book of Night Women won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, 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’ New York Times bestselling Dark Star Trilogy set in African legend includes Black Leopard, Red Wolf which received the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the 2020 Locus Award for Horror, was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in the Fiction category, was named one of the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2019, and was included in the Kirkus list for The Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far) and Moon Witch, Spider King, an NPR Best Book of 2022. The third book will be titled White Wing, Dark Star (Random House).

James’ short fiction and nonfiction have been anthologized in Bronx Noir, The Book of Men: Eighty Writers on How to Be a Man and elsewhere, and have appeared in Esquire, Granta, Harper’s, The Caribbean Review of Books and other publications. His widely read essay, “From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself,” appeared in the New York Times Magazine. In early 2016 his viral video Are you racist? ‘No’ isn’t a good enough answer received millions of hits. James co-hosts a popular podcast about literature with Jake Morrissey called Marlon and Jake Read Dead People. He provided commentary for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from ReBind.

Marlon James wrote and is executive producer for Get Millie Black a 5-part crime drama set in Jamaica for movie channel HBO and the UK's Channel 4.

Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970. He 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 Masters in creative writing. In 2018 Marlon James received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. In April 2019 he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2019 in the Pioneers category. In 2026 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. James is the subject of A Brief History of Silence, an in-progress documentary by filmmaker Stephen Winter.  

In his presentations, James addresses topics related to writing and the writing process, as well as issues pertaining to the history of the Caribbean, race and gender in the US and UK, and youth subcultures as expressed in literature and music such as hip-hop and reggae.