Marlon James — An Evening with the Man Booker Prize Winner
Jamaican novelist Marlon James — author of A Brief History of Seven Killings and the Dark Star fantasy trilogy — in conversation with author Jodi-Ann Burey at Town Hall Seattle.
Why we picked this
James is one of the few writers working today who operates fluently across literary fiction, genre fantasy, and television — an evening with him is rarely a standard author talk and more often an exploration of what storytelling can carry.
Marlon James became the first Jamaican author to win the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings — a novel told through nineteen narrators and spanning four decades of Jamaican history, organized around the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley. The book was praised as an unprecedented act of literary ambition and genre compression, combining political history, crime fiction, and oral narrative into something that didn’t fit existing categories. His subsequent Dark Star fantasy trilogy (Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Moon Witch, Spider King) applied the same approach to African mythology, building a world from the ground up without the European fantasy template.
Beyond novels, James writes for The New York Times, hosts the podcast Marlon and Jake Read Dead People (with novelist Jake Lamar), and served as writer and executive producer for the HBO/Channel 4 series Get Millie Black. The breadth of that work is not dilettantism — it reflects a single sustained interest in how stories carry history and how fiction can make visible what official narrative conceals.
The evening’s conversation is conducted by Jodi-Ann Burey, author of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, who brings her own sharp perspective on storytelling, identity, and the expectations placed on writers from marginalized communities. Presented by Seattle Arts & Lectures; available in-person and via livestream.