THE SASS MACHINE

Booker-prize winner Marlon James on the long-winded path to writing the 'African Game of Thrones' 

- ANJULY MATHAI

This story is about the Jamaican writer Marlon James, but he is not its hero. Some might even call him its anti-hero. It was not always so. There was a time in his childhood when he believed in absolutes—in good and evil, truth and falsehood, heaven and hell….

He remembers his childhood as a time of innocence, but also of sheer boredom. “I had a very 1980s suburban childhood,” he tells THE WEEK. “It’s funny, I have talked to writers in Sweden, Sheffield and Minneapolis, and one thing we all had in common was our childhood. If you lived in the suburbs, you had the same kind of childhood— the same kind of house, two working parents, two cars and you were raised by Madonna and Sesame Street. I was not lonely, but I was alone a lot. Like many writers, I spent a lot of time in the world of Marvel and DC comics than with actual people.”