Marlon James

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-26

Marlon James was born on November 24, 1970, in Kingston, Jamaica, to parents who both served in the Jamaican police force; his mother introduced him to literature through the stories of O. Henry, while his father fostered his love of Shakespeare and Coleridge. He attended Wolmer's Trust High School for Boys, earned a degree in language and literature from the University of the West Indies in 1991, and later received an MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Pennsylvania in 2006. He left Jamaica partly to escape anti-gay violence and limited economic opportunity, and now teaches at Macalester College in Minneapolis. His early novels, John Crow's Devil (2005, rejected by publishers seventy times before acceptance), The Book of Night Women (2009), and A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), established him as a major literary voice exploring Jamaican history and politics; A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker Prize in 2015, making James the first Jamaican author to receive the honor, alongside the OCM Bocas Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He subsequently turned to epic fantasy with the Dark Star Trilogy, described by reviewers as an 'African Game of Thrones': Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022), with a third volume, White Wing, Dark Star, planned. James was named to the TIME 100 in 2019, became a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in 2024, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2026; he also created the HBO/Channel 4 series Get Millie Black (2024).

Universe(s)

Books

• Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) · The Dark Star Trilogy Core Canon
• Moon Witch, Spider King (2022) · The Dark Star Trilogy Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 2 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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