Marlon James: The Disappearers
Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James discusses his new novel The Disappearers at Sydney Goldstein Theater — co-presented with Litquake San Francisco.
Why we picked this
James won the Booker with a novel that reconstructed a real Jamaican murder through seventy-five voices — the ambition of that project tells you everything about what he's likely to bring to new work.
Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker Prize in 2015 with an audacity that surprised even his admirers: 686 pages, seventy-five narrators, and a reconstruction of the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley that expanded into a sprawling portrait of Caribbean and American political violence across two decades. It was the kind of novel that changes what other writers think is possible.
His subsequent work — the Dark Star Trilogy, beginning with Black Leopard, Red Wolf — turned toward African mythology and fantasy with the same structural ambition and refusal of easy narrative. The Disappearers is his new novel, arriving in December 2026.
Co-presented with Litquake, San Francisco’s literary festival organization — a pairing that reflects James’s standing as one of the writers contemporary literary culture follows most closely. An end-of-year conversation worth scheduling around.