What this year’s winners tell us about the Man Booker and Nobel prizes

Like Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel-winner, Marlon James’s Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings was praised for its polyphonic writing – just one of the striking motifs to emerge from this year’s awards

It must be a pure coincidence, but it’s nonetheless an intriguing pattern. Ever since the Man Booker prize announced that American authors would in future be welcome, prompting concern that this would be at their Commonwealth counterparts’ expense, the Commonwealth has kept on winning, as it did in its “The Empire Strikes Back” Booker heyday in the 1980s and 90s: New Zealand’s Eleanor Catton in 2013 (chosen after the revised rules were revealed but before they were implemented), Australia’s Richard Flanagan in 2014, and this week Jamaica’s Marlon James. Meanwhile, some illustrious US figures have either got only so far in the elimination process – Joshua Ferris, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marilynne Robinson – or, as with Jonathan Franzen, Donna Tartt and presumably Toni Morrison, failed even to make the longlist.

James, whose A Brief History of Seven Killings swirls around an assassination attempt on Bob Marley (identified only as “The Singer”) in 1976, is the first Booker laureate from Jamaica and the first Caribbean winner to write a Caribbean novel, since only one of the linked stories in VS Naipaul’s In a Free State (1971) is set there. The author of two previous novels, James is also the first black winner since Ben Okri in 1991, and the first gay winner since Alan Hollinghurst in 2004. Others, notably Thomas Keneally and Hilary Mantel, have won with books with historical figures at their centre, but his reggae star appears to be the first pop culture celebrity to have had a victorious novel built around him.

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