Marlon James
āBooks come out of books,ā Cormac McCarthy once said. Heās right of course; fiction has always come out of fiction. Sometimes to uncover a marginalized voice, or to humanize a demon (Jane Eyre/Wide Sargasso Sea). Sometimes to make troublingly round, the reassuringly flat (Great Expectations/Jack Maggs).Ā SometimesĀ to return to the scene of the crime (The Shining/Ā Doctor Sleep).Ā And sometimes to view a story from back then in a point of view that reflects us now (DonĀ Quixote/ Quichote). All these stories came out of stories that compelled the author to respond.Ā
This is what you will be doing in this workshop: writing Fiction as a response to Fiction. The dismissed voice, the monster with a soul, the character without agency, the character everybody but you forgot. The villain. The punch line. The caricature. The racist joke. Who can you uncover? What can you take (or reject) and make your own? Which story demands another view? What was merely hinted at, that you could bring to the fore?Ā Reaction/Fiction is where you will twist, turn and violate, but will also uncover, re-humanize and dignify.Ā Ā In this class, the āendingā is just the beginning of where your imagination will take you.
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.ās 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, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Marlon Jamesā first novel, John Crow’s Devil, though rejected 78 times before being accepted for publication, went on to become 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 second 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. His best-selling book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, is the first in the Dark Star Trilogy, a fantasy series set in African legend. Black Leopard, Red Wolf 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, and was named one of the Washington Post‘s 10 Best Books of 2019.
The second book in the trilogy, Moon Witch, Spider King, was an instant New York Times Bestseller. The third book will be titled White Wing, Dark Star (Random House).
Marlon James wrote and is executive producer for Get Millie Black a 6-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 2024 his book A Brief History of Seven Killings (#42) was one of the New York Times Book Review‘s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
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.
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PREE is an online platform for lively, vital writing from the Caribbean. Our scope is wide, ranging from fiction and poetry to art writing, non-fiction, interviews and experimental short to medium form film, videos and texts. We are the pre-eminent forum for writing in, from and on the region, a showcase for the exceptional prose and creative expression the Caribbean is fast developing a reputation for.
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