Paul Beatty has become the first US author to win the Man Booker Prize. He won the award for his racial satire, ‘The Sellout’ at a ceremony in London’s Guildhall yesterday.
The novel tells the story of a young black man who tries to reinstate slavery and racial segregation in a suburb of Los Angeles. Amanda Foreman, Chair of the Judges, said the book managed to eviscerate every social taboo.
The Booker Prize is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK.
The 54-year-old Los Angeles-born writer won for The Sellout, a laugh-out-loud novel whose main character wants to assert his African American identity by, outrageously and transgressively, bringing back slavery and segregation.
Beatty has admitted readers might find it a difficult book to digest but the historian Amanda Foreman, who chaired this year’s judging panel, said that was no bad thing.
“Fiction should not be comfortable,” Foreman said. “The truth is rarely pretty and this is a book that nails the reader to the cross with cheerful abandon … that is why the novel works.
“While you’re being nailed, you’re being tickled. It is highwire act which he pulls off with tremendous verve and energy and confidence. He never once lets up or pulls his punches. This is somebody writing at the top of their game.”
Foreman called it a “novel for our times”, particularly in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The Sellout is one of those very rare books: which is able to take satire, which is a very difficult subject and not always done well, and plunges it into the heart of contemporary American society with a savage wit of the kind I haven’t seen since Swift or Twain.