Man Booker winner’s debut novel rejected nearly 80 times!

Marlon James, the Jamaican winner of this year’s Man Booker prize for fiction, has revealed that he briefly abandoned writing after his first novel was rejected nearly 80 times.

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The author told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he had not slept since his third book, A Brief History of Seven Killings was announced as the winner of the £50,000 prize at a black-tie dinner at Guildhall in London on Tuesday night.

He recalled that his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected 78 times by publishers, before it was eventually published in 2005. “I had to sit down and add it up one day and I had no idea it was that much,” he said.

“There was a time I actually thought I was writing the kind of stories people didn’t want to read,” he told Today. Asked if he had considered giving up writing, the 44-year-old writer said: “I did give it up. I actually destroyed the manuscript, I even went on my friends computers and erased it.” He said he retrieved the text by searching in the email outbox of an old iMac computer.

James is the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker prize, taking the award for an uncompromising fictional history of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976.