On Tuesday night, the Man Booker prize’s first Jamaican winner Marlon James took home a cheque for £50,000; now on Wednesday morning he is being honoured with a special postmark from the Royal Mail which is being applied to millions of letters around the UK.
James won the Booker for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, a fictionalised version of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in the 1970s described as “an extraordinary book” by chair of judges Michael Wood. The Royal Mail has now added its own stamp of approval, with a new postmark which will be applied to stamped mail from now until 17 October. This is the second time the Royal Mail has marked the Booker winner, after honouring Richard Flanagan last year.
The postmark will read: ‘‘Congratulations to Marlon James, winner of the 2015 Man Booker prize.”
James, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica and who now lives in Minneapolis, is the first Jamaican to win the Booker in its 47-year history. A Brief History of Seven Killings is his third novel; his debut John Crow’s Devil was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize and the Commonwealth Writers prize, and his second, The Book of Night Women, won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace prize.
A Brief History of Seven Killings, published by independent press Oneworld, had been given odds of 5/1 to win the Booker by Ladbrokes, with US writer Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life in pole position at 11/10. Jonathan Ruppin at Foyles said that it had been a “terrific year” for the Booker, with the shortlist, which also included Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen and Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, rivalling “some of the finest in its history, full of books that demonstrate the novel’s continuing evolution as an artform and its unique capacity for exploring and understanding our society at a complex level.”
“How this year’s winner will fare in bookshops remains to be seen, but the prize is about much more than that: it’s a signpost to readers that there is no limit to the forms a novel can take and the ideas it can embrace,” said Ruppin.
According to the Bookseller, James’s novel has sold 12,237 copies through book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan to date, with 1,206 copies sold last week, putting it in 268th place in the UK’s bestseller list.
Last year’s winner, Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, sold 300,000 copies in the UK and 800,000 worldwide. Used bookseller Abebooks said that before James was announced as winner last night, it had five copies of A Brief History of Seven Killings on sale. They had all sold in 12 minutes following the announcement, the most expensive for $500.
