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One of the world’s most respected literary awards—the Man Booker Prize for Fiction—has been awarded for the first time to an American writer, Paul Beatty (CAS’84, GRS’87). Beatty was unanimously selected for his blowtorch-hot satire on race in America, The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
At a ceremony in London on October 25, 2016, the 54-year-old New York writer received a trophy and a check for £50,000 (about $61,000). He received another £2,500 (about $3,000) for making the short list of finalists. The Royal Mail, the British postal service, issued a congratulatory postmark that was temporarily applied to millions of items of stamped mail, saying “Congratulations to Paul Beatty, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize.”
The Sellout also won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction.
Shot through with profanity and liberal use of the N-word, The Sellout landed with a bang, its publication coinciding with the nationwide controversy over police shootings of black men across the United States and the launch of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It was a hard book for me to write; I know it’s hard to read,” Beatty said at the prize ceremony. “I’m just trying to create space for myself. And hopefully that can create space for others.”
As The Sellout opens, its African American narrator, an urban farmer and artisan weed dealer, has been hauled before the Supreme Court for offenses that include trying to resegregate his hometown of Dickens, Calif., and reinstate slavery with the help of his sidekick, the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins.
The book recounts the sometimes agonizing journey that led the narrator to this point—his father, a social scientist, was shot dead by police on a street corner—in terms that has earned Beatty comparisons to figures from Jonathan Swift to Richard Pryor and Chris Rock. Dwight Garner’s New York Times review says, “The first 100 pages of [Beatty’s] new novel, The Sellout, are the most caustic and the most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I’ve read in at least a decade.”
Historian Amanda Foreman, chair of the five-judge Man Booker panel, calls The Sellout “a novel for our times. A tirelessly inventive modern satire, its humor disguises a radical seriousness. Paul Beatty slays sacred cows with abandon and takes aim at racial and political taboos with wit, verve, and a snarl.”
Beatty, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology at BU, is the author of three other novels and two books of poetry. (He was named Grand Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Café in 1990.) He is also the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor (Bloomsbury, 2006).
First bestowed in 1969, the Man Booker Prize was initially known as the Booker Prize. It has been sponsored by the Man Group, a large investment management firm, since 2002. Until 2014, only authors from Britain, Ireland, and the Commonwealth nations were eligible, and the decision to open the competition up to any novel published in Britain was controversial. The 2015 winner was Jamaican-born Marlon James, for A Brief History of Seven Killings, a novel about the attempted assassination of musician Bob Marley. Among past winners are Salman Rushdie, Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Michael Ondaatje.
A wonderful piece. It is great to see that a prize that has its origin in Guyana and some of my ancestors’ sweat and blood (Indian Indentured immigrants, who arrived in the, then, colony, British Guiana starting in 1838) is open to, and has been won by, an American. The irony is that despite living in the US for almost two decades, none of my books (published in Toronto) have been eligible for any of the major US prizes, or the Booker Prize for that matter. The Booker prize was initiated by Sir Jock Campbell after returning to the UK, having served the Booker group in Guyana from 1934 to 1967 (Chairman of the group from 1952-1967–according to Wikipedia). Because the Booker group owned most of the sugar plantations in Guyana before independence from the UK, Guyana was known as Booker-Guyana (& Booker-Guiana, prior to independence). As always, the Indians from the West Indies (including Guyana and Suriname on mainland South America–also known as Indo-Caribbeans) are given short shrift: we are not black/creole enough to be Caribbean (see my post at http://poets-and-co.blogspot.ca/2016/01/give-ball-to-poet-racism-in-caribbean.html — which was also published in the Guyana Times), or “Indian” enough in the US and Canada to be Indo-American (even when we are more philosophically grounded in India than first and second generation Indian writers in North America). We do love brackets and bonnets. I leave with a reference to the last line of this otherwise wonderful piece on the Man Booker Prize: among the past winners of this Prize omits one of the greatest living prose writers in English and the preeminent West Indian writer (of course, an Indian from the Caribbean and this probably explains his exclusion!), V.S. Naipaul. Cheers!