Marlon James has become the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker prize, taking the award for an epic, uncompromising novel not for the faint of heart. It brims with shocking gang violence, swearing, graphic sex, drug crime but also, said the judges, a lot of laughs.

A Brief History of Seven Killings, a fictional history of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976, was “an extraordinary book”, said Michael Wood, the chair of judges. “[It was] very exciting, very violent, full of swearing. It was a book we didn’t actually have any difficulty deciding on – it was a unanimous decision, a little bit to our surprise.”

James, aged 44, who lives in Minneapolis, is the first Jamaican author to win the prize in the Man Booker’s 47-year history.

His novel has a lot of fans: it was described by the New York Times as: “like a Tarantino remake of the The Harder They Come, but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner … sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex.”

Accepting the award from Camilla, the Duchess of Cambridge, James said: “I just met Ben Okri [who won for The Famished Road in 1991] and it just reminded me of how much of my literary sensibilities were shaped by the ManBooker prize.. it suddenly increases your library by 13 books.”

He dedicated his win to his late father with who, he recalled, he used to have Shakespeare duels with as a boy. “Who can have the longest soliloquy ... just imagine a father and son in a Jamaican rum bar.”

James said he hoped his win would bring more attention to Caribbean writing but he admitted he had to leave Jamaice to write the book, it was “a novel of exile ... I needed that distance, I needed that sense of maybe there wouldn’t be consequences.” He said it was the riskiest novel he had written, in terms of subject and form and it was “affirming” winning the prize. “I would have been happy with two people liking it.”

In his Guardian review, the Jamaican poet Kei Miller praised the book’s ambition, writing that “[it] explores the aesthetics of cacophony and also the aesthetics of violence.”

(The Guardian)