Marlon James became the first Jamaican winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction Tuesday with a vivid, violent, exuberant and expletive-laden novel based on the attempted assassination of Bob Marley.
Michael Wood, chairman of the judging panel, said A Brief History of Seven Killings was "the most exciting book on the list" and a novel full of the "sheer pleasure" of language.
"One of the pleasures of reading it is you turn the page and you are not sure who the next narrator will be," said Wood, a professor emeritus of English at Princeton University. He said the book had been the unanimous choice of the five judges.
James, 44, was awarded the 50,000 pound ($NZ114,000) prize during a black-tie dinner at London's medieval Guildhall. A Brief History of Seven Killings is the third novel from the writer, who now lives in Minneapolis.
The book charts political violence in Jamaica and the spread of crack cocaine in the US, and hinges on a 1976 attempt on the life of reggae superstar Marley - identified in the book only as "The Singer." The story is told in a cacophony of voices - from gangsters to ghosts, drug dealers to CIA agents - and in dialects ranging from American English to Jamaican patois.